相关论文: Evolutionary Catastrophes and the Goldilocks Probl…

The probability that life spontaneously emerges in a suitable environment (abiogenesis) is one of the major unknowns in astrobiology. Assessing its value is impeded by the lack of an accepted theory for the origin of life, and is further…

The problem of error growth due to the incomplete knowledge of the evolution law which rules the dynamics of a given physical system is addressed. Major interest is devoted to the analysis of error amplification in systems with many…

A simple stochastic model for evolution, based upon the need to pass a sequence of n critical steps (Carter 1983, Watson 2008) is applied to both terrestrial and extraterrestrial origins of life. In the former case, the time at which humans…

Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…

In a multiverse context, determining the probability of being in our particular universe depends on estimating its overall habitability compared to other universes with different values of the fundamental constants. One of the most…

How can scientists conclude with high confidence that an exoplanet hosts life? As telescopes come on line over the next 20 years that can directly observe photons from terrestrial exoplanets, this question will dictate the activities of…

The Anthropocene is characterized by close interdependencies between the natural Earth system and the human society, posing novel challenges to model development. Here we present a conceptual model describing the long-term coevolution of…

A reliable understanding of the Earth system is essential for the life quality of modern society. Natural hazards are the cause of most life and resource losses. The ability to define the conditions for a sustainable development of…

One of the most interesting unsolved questions in science today is the question of life on other planets. At the present time it is safe to say that we do not have much of an idea as to whether life is common or exceedingly rare in the…

In the past 15 years, astronomers have revealed that a significant fraction of the stars should harbor planets and that it is likely that terrestrial planets are abundant in our galaxy. Among these planets, how many are habitable, i.e.…

It is sometimes assumed that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. Here we critically examine the assumptions inherent in this if-life-evolved-rapidly-life-must-be-common argument. We use the…

Recently, many Earth-sized planets have been discovered around stars other than the Sun that might possess appropriate conditions for life. The development of theoretical methods for assessing the putative habitability of these worlds is of…

A conflict exists between field biologists and physiologists ("functional biologists" or "evolutionary ecologists") on the one hand and those working in molecular evolution ("evolutionary biologists" or "population geneticists") on the…

Weak selection, which means a phenotype is slightly advantageous over another, is an important limiting case in evolutionary biology. Recently it has been introduced into evolutionary game theory. In evolutionary game dynamics, the…

In ecological systems, be it a petri dish or a galaxy, populations evolve from some initial value (say zero) up to a steady state equilibrium, when the mean number of births and deaths per unit time are equal. This equilibrium point is a…

We briefly review some of the scientific challenges and epistemological issues related to climate science. We discuss the formulation and testing of theories and numerical models, which, given the presence of unavoidable uncertainties in…

The notion of a Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ), or regions of the Milky Way galaxy that preferentially maintain the conditions to sustain complex life, has recently gained attention due to the detection of numerous exoplanets and advances…

Entropy decreases on the Earth due to day/night temperature differences. This decrease exceeds the decrease in entropy on the Earth related to evolution by many orders of magnitude. Claims by creationists that science is somehow…

Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…

Earth is the only planet known to harbor life and, as a result, the search for habitable and inhabited planets beyond the Solar System commonly focuses on analogs to our planet. However, Earth's atmosphere and surface environment have…