Wandering Wim's Blog

This year we celebrate Stuart Kauffman’s 80th birthday. Kauffman was one of the early proponents of the view that the complexity we see in biological systems is not necessarily a consequence of natural selection alone, but could result just as well from spontaneous self-organization.

Read the full story on the EES blog…

My 3-part series of popular science articles on the history of origin of life research has been published in ORBITER magazine. Part 1 presents a “pre-history” of how the origin of life became a real scientific problem in the first place (for many centuries it actually wasn’t!). Part 2 presents a brief overview of 20th century scientific progress on origin of life research, from the idea of a primordial soup to that of an RNA world, and beyond. Finally, part 3 presents a brief history of autocatalytic sets, from Stuart Kauffman’s original idea published in 1971, to some of the most recent insights.

A particular mathematical relationship known as a power law has been observed in many day-to-day situations, from the frequencies in which words are used in natural languages to the connectivity distribution in Facebook friendship networks. As it turns out, though, such a power law can also be found in snooker statistics. And if the amazing Ronnie O’Sullivan continues to produce centuries at the same rate, the mathematical correspondence will be even better!

Read the full story on Plus magazine…

“Developmental bias is a manifestation of a much more fundamental principle, and is the norm rather than the exception”, according to one scientist. “Developmental bias is a misleading term and we should get rid of it”, according to another. Both were in the same room, at the same time. So what is developmental bias, what role does it play in evolution, and why do we even care? These questions were the focus of an interesting and spirited workshop, the third in a series of EES project meetings, held recently at the Santa Fe Institute. As with the first meeting, I was able to sit in on this workshop, like a fly on the wall, and listen to the presentations, arguments, and debates. Here’s what I learned…

Read the full piece on the EES Blog…

“Since you are a computer scientist, I have an optimisation problem for you!”, my colleague said, half jokingly. As an ecologist, one of the things my colleague studies is invasive plant species. The question he was facing is how to reconstruct the most likely routes along which these species travel when they invade new territory, based on historical records on when and where they first appeared. As it turns out, this question is an instance of a known mathematical optimisation problem called the minimum cost arborescence problem.

Read the full story on Plus Magazine…