Related papers: Immortality as a physical problem
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
Metabolic energy consumption has long been thought to play a major role in the aging process ({\it 1}). Across species, a gram of tissue on average expends about the same amount of energy during life-span ({\it 2}). Energy restriction has…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
We study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…
Are there limits to human longevity? We suggest a new demographic model to describe human demographic trajectories. Specifically, the model mathematically defines the limits of longevity. Through the demographic analysis of trends for…
Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phenotypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evolution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law…
Molecular traits, such as gene expression levels or protein binding affinities, are increasingly accessible to quantitative measurement by modern high-throughput techniques. Such traits measure molecular functions and, from an evolutionary…
The unreduced, universally nonperturbative analysis of arbitrary interaction process, described by a quite general equation, provides the truly complete, "dynamically multivalued" general solution that leads to dynamically derived,…
The provision of intergenerational care, via the Grandmother Hypothesis, has been implicated in the evolution of post-fertile longevity, particularly in humans. However, if grandmothering does provide fitness benefits, a key question is why…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
It is a common belief that in any environment where life is possible, life will be generated. Here it is suggested that the cause for a spontaneous generation of complex systems is probability driven processes. Based on equilibrium…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
We examine the dynamics of an age-structured population model in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of the parent. While the total population of the system always reaches a steady state, the…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in various contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the dynamics of survival analysis,…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…