Wandering Wim's Blog

Last August I presented a brief (12min) talk about the history of research on autocatalytic sets, a concept originally introduced by Stuart Kauffman. This talk was presented during the Stufest, a 2-day workshop held at the Santa Fe[…]

Having a bit of a cold this weekend, and didn’t have the energy to do anything more useful. So I created this fun and colorful Mandelbrot zoom. Enjoy!

In Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, the key phrase is “survival of the fittest”: those organisms that are best fit to carry out the tasks of living in their world are the ones that survive. But[…]

One of the main reasons evolution can be difficult to grasp, or even accept, is the time scales involved. Biological evolution does usually not occur right in front of our eyes (other than in laboratory experiments), but happens over[…]

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[…]

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[…]

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[…]