26 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Elliot M. Butterworth, Tim Rogers, Matthew A. Wills
Attempts to quantify biological complexity often consider intrinsic structural properties at a chosen hierarchical level and resolution, such as counts of body parts and their degree of differentiation. These measures are inherently \emph{syntactic}, being concerned with the information needed to specify an arrangement…
Yaroslav Ispolatov, Evgeniia Alekseeva, Michael Doebeli
Non-uniform rates of morphological evolution and evolutionary increases in organismal complexity, captured in metaphors like "adaptive zones", "punctuated equilibrium" and "blunderbuss patterns", require more elaborate explanations than a simple gradual accumulation of mutations. Here we argue that nonuniform…
Hagai Rappeport, Mor Nitzan
A common underlying assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation generally drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing the evolution of complexity appear more nuanced, and the forces which drive increase or decrease in organismal complexity are not fully understood. Evolution is…
Börje Ekstig
In this paper, I discuss the concept of complexity. I show that the principle of natural selection as acting on complexity gives a solution to the problem of reconciling the seemingly contradictory notion of generally increasing complexity and the observation that most species don’t follow such a trend. I suggest the…
Jonathan D. Phillips, Richard Summers, Nikolay Kolev Vitanov
Multiple pathways and outcomes are common in evolutionary sequences for biological and other environmental systems due to nonlinear complexity, historical contingency, and disturbances. From any starting point, multiple evolutionary pathways are possible. From an endpoint or observed state, multiple possibilities exist…
Tom Röschinger, Roberto Morán Tovar, Simone Pompei, Michael Lässig
Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity. Molecular recognition sites are short genome segments or peptides binding a cognate recognition target of sufficient sequence similarity. Such…
Andrés Moya, José L. Oliver, Miguel Verdú, Luis Delaye + 9 more
Progressive evolution, the tendency towards increasing complexity, is a controversial issue in Biology, whose resolution requires a proper measurement of complexity. Genomes are the best entities to address this challenge, as they record the history and information gaining of organisms in their ongoing biotic and…
Rama S. Singh, Bhagwati P. Gupta
The sequencing of the human genome heralded the new age of ‘genetic medicine’ and raised the hope of precision medicine facilitating prolonged and healthy lives. Recent studies have dampened this expectation, as the relationships among mutations (termed ‘risk factors’), biological processes, and diseases have emerged…
Vitaly Vanchurin, Yuri I. Wolf, Mikhail I. Katsnelson, Eugene V. Koonin
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 that appear to be necessary and sufficient to render a universe observable and show…
Alden H. Wright, Cheyenne L. Laue
Understanding the evolution of complexity is an important topic in a wide variety of academic fields. Implications of better understanding complexity include increased knowledge of major evolutionary transitions and the properties of living and technological systems. Genotype-phenotype (G-P) maps are fundamental to…
Andreas Wagner
Two main lines of research link information theory to evolutionary biology. The first focuses on organismal phenotypes, and on the information that organisms acquire about their environment. The second connects information-theoretic concepts to genotypic change. The genotypic and phenotypic level can be linked by…
Thomas LaBar, Christoph Adami
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, this does not automatically imply that strong selection enhances the chance for…
Walter Veit, Samuel J. L. Gascoigne, Roberto Salguero-Gómez
In this article, we revisit the longstanding debate of whether there is a pattern in the evolution of organisms towards greater complexity, and how this hypothesis could be tested using an interdisciplinary lens. We argue that this debate remains alive today due to the lack of a quantitative measure of complexity that…
Alexey V. Melkikh, Alexey V. Melkikh, Andrei Khrennikov
A review of the mechanisms of speciation is performed. The mechanisms of the evolution of species, taking into account the feedback of the state of the environment and mechanisms of the emergence of complexity, are considered. It is shown that these mechanisms, at the molecular level, cannot work steadily in terms of…
Rok Grah, Calin C. Guet, Gasper Tkačik, Mato Lagator
A major obstacle to predictive understanding of evolution stems from the complexity of biological systems, which prevents detailed characterization of key evolutionary properties. Here, we highlight some of the major sources of complexity that arise when relating molecular mechanisms to their evolutionary consequences…
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…
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…
Irun R. Cohen
The evolution of species, according to Darwin, is driven by struggle - by competition between variant autonomous individuals for survival of the fittest and reproductive advantage; the outcome of this struggle for survival is natural selection. The Neo-Darwinians reframed natural selection in terms of DNA: inherited…
Artem Kaznatcheev
Valiant [1] proposed to treat Darwinian evolution as a special kind of computational learning from statistical queries. The statistical queries represent a genotype’s fitness over a distribution of challenges. And this distribution of challenges along with the best response to them specify a given abiotic environment…
Mohamed Swailem, Ken A. Dill
What drove nucleic acids (NA) to associate with proteins (PR) at the Origins of Life? We reason from polymer physics and the Central Dogma (CD) that the fitness value of cooperating through a division of labor – NA for replication fidelity and PR for functional fitness – is much higher than for either polymer alone.…
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…
Selene M.C. Cannelli, Ritvik Gupta, Tan Nguyen, Arunava Poddar + 3 more
Liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) is a process that often occurs due to binding between oppositely charged biopolymers, and has gained increasing attention recently due to their ubiquity in biological systems and ability to direct essential cellular processes. For example, aberrant biological LLPS can lead to the…
Authors not listed
Designing molecules with specific target properties remains a fundamental challenge in computational chemistry. While existing approaches show promise, most rely on simplified representations like SMILES strings or 2D graphs that lack essential three-dimensional geometric information. We present EvoDiffMol, a…
Dariia Yehorova, Rory Crean, Peter Kasson, Shina Caroline Lynn Kamerlin
Protein structure (and thus function) is dictated by non-covalent interaction networks. These can be highly evolutionarily conserved across protein families, the members of which can diverge in sequence and evolutionary history. Here we present KIN, a tool to identify and analyze conserved non-covalent interaction…
Anna Matuszyńska, Oliver Ebenhöh, Matias D. Zurbriggen, Daniel C. Ducat + 1 more
Synthetic biology designs and constructs new biological parts, devices and systems with predetermined functionalities. With the unlimited ability to synthesise any DNA and RNA and transfer it to almost any organism, we are at the dawn of a new era in which biology is being recreated in ways never before possible. It…
Brianna Greenstein, Danielle Elsey, Geoffrey Hutchison
Genetic algorithms (GAs) are a powerful tool to search large chemical spaces for inverse molecular design. However, GAs have multiple hyperparameters that have not been thoroughly investigated for chemical space searches. In this work, we examine the general effects of a number of hyperparameters, such as population…