23 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Irun R. Cohen, Assaf Marron
The evolution of multicellular eukaryotes expresses two sorts of adaptations: local adaptations like fur or feathers, which characterize species in particular environments, and universal adaptations like microbiomes or sexual reproduction, which characterize most multicellulars in any environment. We reason that the…
Bernadette Mathew, Abhishek Halder, Nancy Jaiswal, Smruti Panda + 8 more
DNA is essentially a collection of short nucleotide sequences with a myriad of functionalities. These oligonucleotides are often studied for their function as molecular binding sites, regulatory motifs or sequence probes. The field of Bioinformatics uses a similar concept under the term “k-mers,” which is central to…
Masakado Kawata
Do you want to know about evolution? Brian and Deborah Charlesworth provide an excellent and concise account of the core issues for a broad range of readers
Vaughn S. Cooper, Taylor M. Warren, Abigail M. Matela, Michael Handwork + 1 more
Evolution is a central, unifying theory for all of life science, yet the subject is poorly represented in most secondary-school biology courses, especially in the United States. One challenge to learning evolution is that it is taught as a conceptual, retrospective subject with few tangible outcomes for students. These…
Liane Gabora, Mike Steel
A central tenet of evolutionary theory is that it requires variation upon which selection can act. We describe a means of attaining cumulative, adaptive, open-ended change that requires neither variation nor selective exclusion, and that can occur in the absence of generations (i.e., no explicit birth or death). This…
Vicky Merhej, Didier Raoult
Darwin's theory about the evolution of species has been the object of considerable dispute. In this review, we have described seven key principles in Darwin's book The Origin of Species and tried to present how genomics challenge each of these concepts and improve our knowledge about evolution. Darwin believed that…
Riccardo Rao, Stanislas Leibler
Any realistic evolutionary theory has to consider: (i) the dynamics of organisms that reproduce and possess heritable traits; (ii) the appearance of stochastic variations in these traits; and (iii) the selection of those organisms that better survive and reproduce. These elements shape the “evolutionary forces” that…
Gerd B. Müller
Since the last major theoretical integration in evolutionary biology-the modern synthesis (MS) of the 1940s-the biosciences have made significant advances. The rise of molecular biology and evolutionary developmental biology, the recognition of ecological development, niche construction and multiple inheritance…
Julian Z. Xue, Leonid Chindelevich, Frédéric Guichard
Many well-documented macro-evolutionary phenomena, such as increases in organization hierarchy, or sudden and episodic creation of new taxa, still challenge current evolutionary theories. Here we show a new mechanism that can explain them. We begin by showing how the order of mutations can alter evolutionary…
Kimberly L. Cooper
Humans are curious to understand the causes of traits that distinguish us from other animals and that distinguish vastly different species from one another. We also have a proclivity for simple stories and sometimes tend toward seeking and accepting simple genetic explanations for large evolutionary shifts, even to a…
Adi Livnat
The theory of interaction-based evolution argues that, at the most basic level of analysis, there is a third alternative for how adaptive evolution works besides a) accidental mutation and natural selection and b) Lamarckism, namely, c) information provided by natural selection on the fit between the organism and its…
John Dupré
This paper briefly describes process metaphysics, and argues that it is better suited for describing life than the more standard thing, or substance, metaphysics. It then explores the implications of process metaphysics for conceptualizing evolution. After explaining what it is for an organism to be a process, the…
Robert Worden
In 1995 I wrote a paper 'A Speed Limit for Evolution' – whose main result was that evolution must proceed rather slowly, in accordance with the earlier views and intuitions of many authors. The abstract of the paper said: 'An upper bound on the speed of evolution is derived. The bound concerns the amount of genetic…
Adi Livnat
How does new genetic information arise? Traditional thinking holds that mutation happens by accident and then spreads in the population by either natural selection or random genetic drift. There have been at least two fundamental conceptual problems with imagining an alternative. First, it seemed that the only…
Kristoffer Reinholt Thomsen, Steen Rasmussen
| 1 | Background | | 1 | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | | 1.1 | A Brief Historical Review of Lamarck's, Darwin's, and Baldwin's fundamental | | | | ideas | | 2 | | | 1.1.1 | Lamarck | 2 | | | 1.1.2 | Darwin | 3 | | | 1.1.3 | Baldwin | 4 | | | 1.2 | A Brief Summary of Modern Evolutionary and Learning Studies | 5 | | |…
Mateusz Krukowski
The paper is devoted to the study of Darwinian evolution in two mathematical models. The first one is a variation on the Malthusian population growth model with Verhulst's environmental capacity. The second model is grounded in the theory of Markov chains and their stationary distributions. We prove preliminary results…
Steven A. Frank
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the population. Deductive theory predicts how populations adapt to environmental…
Owen M. Gilbert
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that appear progressive, and seemingly more advanced forms of life have appeared. To…
Yoshiharu Mukouyama, Kenya Tanaka, Shuji Nakanishi, Yoshihiro Nakato
The present work reveals that a prebiotic chemical system can generate self-organizing ability that leads to highly ordered structures and an active character such as free independent harmonious behavior. This result is the properties of natural things that have long been overlooked since Darwin’s theory of evolution…
Amit Kahana, Lior Segev, Doron Lancet
The origin of life must have involved an unlikely transition from chaotic chemistry to reproducing supramolecular structures. Previous quantitative analyses of reproducing mutually catalytic networks made of simple molecules have led to increasing popularity of this pre-RNA scenario for life’s origin. Here, we…
Authors not listed
Genetic Algorithms are a powerful method to solve optimization problems with complex cost functions over vast search spaces that rely in particular on recombining parts of previous solutions. Crossover operators play a crucial role in this context. Here, we describe a large class of these operators designed for…
Authors not listed
The GENERIC framework provides a robust structure for nonequilibrium dynamics but lacks a principled method to select reversible ($L$) and irreversible ($M$) brackets. Similarly, finite-time optimizations minimizing path-averaged reciprocal temperature exist but remain isolated. Here, we introduce the \textbf{Entropy…
Benjamin King, Max Winokan, Paul Stevenson, Jim Al-Khalili + 2 more
The adenine-thymine tautomer (A-T) has previously been discounted as a spontaneous mutagenesis mechanism due to the energetic instability of the tautomeric configuration. We study the stability of A-T while the nucleobases undergo DNA strand separation. Our calculations indicate an increase in the stability of A-T as…