Related papers: Bacteria are not Lamarckian
We apply the theory of learning to physically renormalizable systems in an attempt to develop a theory of biological evolution, including the origin of life, as multilevel learning. We formulate seven fundamental principles of evolution…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
The idea that all life on earth traces back to a common beginning dates back at least to Charles Darwin's {\em Origin of Species}. Ever since, biologists have tried to piece together parts of this `tree of life' based on what we can observe…
Many of the chemical reactions that take place within a living cell are irreversible. Due to evolutionary pressures, the number of allowable reactions within these systems are highly constrained and thus the resulting metabolic networks…
This paper focuses on the maximum speed at which biological evolution can occur. I derive inequalities that limit the rate of evolutionary processes driven by natural selection, mutations, or genetic drift. These \emph{rate limits} link the…
Bacteria live in environments that are continuously fluctuating and changing. Exploiting any predictability of such fluctuations can lead to an increased fitness. On longer timescales bacteria can "learn" the structure of these fluctuations…
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions…
Any search for present or past life beyond Earth should consider the initial processes and related environmental controls that might have led to its start. As on Earth, such an understanding lies well beyond how simple organic molecules…
The concept of neutral evolutionary networks being a significant factor in evolutionary dynamics was first proposed by Huynen {\em et al.} about 7 years ago. In one sense, the principle is easy to state -- because most mutations to an…
The scientific community believes in the theory of evolution with a passion that rivals that of any religious belief. This passion extends beyond the irrefutable evidence of the fossil record to the familiar claims of survival of the…
For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…
Viruses display striking diversity in structure, transmission mode, immune interaction, and evolutionary behavior. Despite this diversity, viral strategies are not unconstrained. Here we present a unifying framework that treats viral…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
Kin selection theory is a kind of causal analysis. The initial form of kin selection ascribed cause to costs, benefits, and genetic relatedness. The theory then slowly developed a deeper and more sophisticated approach to partitioning the…
Situations where individuals have to contribute to joint efforts or share scarce resources are ubiquitous. Yet, without proper mechanisms to ensure cooperation, the evolutionary pressure to maximize individual success tends to create a…
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…
Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in biology…
In order to make a case for or against a trend in the evolution of complexity in biological evolution, complexity needs to be both rigorously defined and measurable. A recent information-theoretic (but intuitively evident) definition…
There is surely some truth to the notion that culture evolves, but the Darwinian view of culture is trivial. Gabora does two things in this paper. First, she levels a reasoned and devastating attack on the adequacy of a Darwinian theory of…
The theory of lithopanspermia proposes the natural exchange of organisms between solar system bodies through meteorites. The focus of this theory comprises three distinct stages: planetary ejection, interplanetary transit and planetary…