Related papers: Bacteria are not Lamarckian
In recent years, studies in epigenetic inheritance in biological systems as well as studies on evolution in non-biological systems e.g., machine learning and robotics, have reopened the discussion of non-Darwinian methods of evolutionary…
The replicator-mutator dynamic was originally derived to model the evolution of language, and since the model was derived in such a general manner, it has been applied to the dynamics of social behavior and decision making in multi-agent…
Individuals of different types, may it be genetic, cultural, or else, with different levels of fitness often compete for reproduction and survival. A fitter type generally has higher chances of disseminating their copies to other…
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down". Can Darwinian random mutations and selection…
The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and…
According to the Baldwin Effect learning can guide evolution. This does not suppose that information about what has been learned is transferred back into the genetic code: in the Baldwin Effect complex multi-gene characteristics are…
Modern biological tools have made it possible to unequivocally demonstrate the deep relationship among species in terms of genes and basic molecular mechanisms. In addition, results from genetic, physical and physiological approaches…
Quantum Darwinism attempts to explain the emergence of objective reality of the state of a quantum system in terms of redundant information about the system acquired by independent non interacting fragments of the environment. The…
Stronger selection implies faster evolution---that is, the greater the force, the faster the change. This apparently self-evident proposition, however, is derived under the assumption that genetic variation within a population is primarily…
Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…
This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson (2008). First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons…
Darwin claims in the {\em Origin} that similarity is evidence for common ancestry, but that adaptive similarities are "almost valueless" as evidence. This claim seems reasonable for some adaptive similarities but not for others. Here we…
We pursue research leading towards the nature of causality in the universe. We establish the equation of the universe's evolution from the universe-state function and its series expansion, in which causes and effects connect together to…
We analyse a series of bacterial growth models with in-built inter-individual variation in rates of cell division. We show that this variation leads to reduced population growth in favorable regimes and reduced population killing in…
To explain aspects of the quantum-to-classical transition, quantum Darwinism explores the fact that, due to interactions between a quantum open system and its surrounding environment, information about the system can be spread redundantly…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
This piece serves two purposes. Firstly, it aims at elucidating the role of epistasis in shaping, at a molecular level, the evolutionary paths of proteins, as well as the extent to which these epistatic effects are the outcome of an…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…