Related papers: Selective pressures on genomes in molecular evolut…
We introduce a novel method to analyse complete genomes and recognise some distinctive features by means of an adaptive compression algorithm, which is not DNA-oriented. We study the Information Content as a function of the number of…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
Compressing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is essential for transferring the success of CNNs to a wide variety of applications to mobile devices. In contrast to directly recognizing subtle weights or filters as redundant in a given…
We consider the effects of social learning on the individual learning and genetic evolution of a colony of artificial agents capable of genetic, individual and social modes of adaptation. We confirm that there is strong selection pressure…
Motivated by present activities in (statistical) physics directed towards biological evolution, we review the interplay of three evolutionary forces: mutation, selection, and genetic drift. The review addresses itself to physicists and…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
Neutral evolution assumes that there are no selective forces distinguishing different variants in a population. Despite this striking assumption, many recent studies have sought to assess whether neutrality can provide a good description of…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
A measure called Physical Complexity is established and calculated for a population of sequences, based on statistical physics, automata theory, and information theory. It is a measure of the quantity of information in an organism's genome.…
Three steps aid in the analysis of selection. First, describe phenotypes by their component causes. Components include genes, maternal effects, symbionts, and any other predictors of phenotype that are of interest. Second, describe fitness…
In computer science, we can theoretically neatly separate transmission and processing of information, hardware and software, and programs and their inputs. This is much more intricate in biology, Nevertheless, I argue that Shannon's concept…
Prion and prion-like molecules are a type of self replicating aggregate protein that have been implicated in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. Over recent decades the molecular dynamics of prions have been characterized both…
Most living systems rely on double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) to store their genetic information and perpetuate themselves. This biological information has been considered the main target of evolution. However, here we show that symmetries and…
Distributed systems, such as biological and artificial neural networks, process information via complex interactions engaging multiple subsystems, resulting in high-order patterns with distinct properties across scales. Investigating how…
The problem of the directionality of genome evolution is studied from the information-theoretic view. We propose that the function-coding information quantity of a genome always grows in the course of evolution through sequence duplication,…
Sorted data is usually easier to compress than unsorted permutations of the same data. This motivates a simple compression scheme: specify the sorted permutation of the data along with a representation of the sorted data compressed…
Network structure has a large impact on constant-selection evolutionary dynamics, with which multiple types of fitness (i.e., strength) compete on the network. Here we study constant-selection dynamics on two-layer networks in which the…
Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…