Related papers: Immortality as a physical problem
The universal genetic code presents a fundamental paradox in molecular biology. Recent advances in synthetic biology have demonstrated that the code is remarkably flexible--organisms can survive with 61 codons instead of 64, natural…
How mutations accumulate in genomes is the central question of molecular evolution theories, however our understanding of this process is far from complete. Drake's rule is a notoriously universal property of genomes from microbes to…
Adaptation is a central topic in theoretical biology, of practical importance for analyzing drug resistance mutations. Several authors have used arguments based on extreme value theory in their work on adaptation. There are complications…
Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…
We present significantly advanced studies of the previously introduced physical growth mechanism and unite it with biochemical growth factors. Obtained results allowed formulating the general growth law which governs growth and evolutional…
A mathematical model of interacting species filling ecological niches left by the extinction of others is introduced. Species organize themselves into genera of all sizes. The size of a genus on average grows linearly with its age,…
Infant deaths and old age deaths are very different. The former are mostly due to severe congenital malformations of one or a small number of specific organs. On the contrary, old age deaths are largely the outcome of a long process of…
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
Jim Shapiro synthesizes a great many observations about the mechanisms of evolution to reach the remarkable conclusion that large-scale modification, exchange, and rearrangement of the genome are common and should be viewed as fundamental…
We twice modify the Penna model for biological ageing. First we introduce back (good) mutations and a memory for them into the model. It allows us to observe an improvement of the species fitness over long time scales as well as punctuated…
Disordered materials are often out of equilibrium and evolve very slowly. This allows a memory of the imposed strains or preparation conditions to be encoded in the material. Here we consider "directed aging", where the elastic properties…
A model for the evolution of a finite population in a rugged fitness landscape is introduced and solved. The population is trapped in an evolutionary loop, alternating periods of stasis to periods in which it performs adaptive walks. The…
The theory of regularity is a philosophical perspective in which laws of nature are just descriptions, that is to say, laws of nature do not govern the world. Moreover, according to the theory of regularity, the number of laws of nature…
It is now increasingly realized that the underlying mechanism which governs aging (ageing) is a complex interplay of genetic regulation and damage-accumulation. "Aging as a result of accumulation of 'faults' on cellular and molecular…
At the physiological level, aging is neither rigid nor unchangeable. Instead, the molecular and mechanisms driving aging are sufficiently plastic that a variety of diverse interventions--dietary, pharmaceutical, and genetic--have been…
We develop a ``unified'' model that describes both ``micro'' and ``macro'' evolutions within a single theoretical framework. The eco-system is described as a dynamic network; the population dynamics at each node of this network describes…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
By unifying three foundational principles of modern biology, we develop a mathematical framework to analyze the growing tree of life. Contrary to the static case, where the analogy between phylogenetic trees and the tree that grows in soil…