Wandering Wim's Blog

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 they won’t live forever — they must have offspring that inherit the traits that made them fit in order for evolution to proceed.

This conceptual framework is fine for understanding the evolution of traits that affect survival and numbers of offspring. But what about the rules of inheritance themselves? These rules are also organismal traits, although they need not have any effect on how well the parents survive or how many offspring they have. In fact, the rules of inheritance say what the offspring are, rather than how many there are. Classical mathematical models of evolution have little to say about the evolution of these rules. How, then, can “survival of the fittest” shape the rules of inheritance?

Read the full story on the EES blog…

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 many generations. Most people, especially in increasingly urbanized environments largely disconnected from the natural world, will never get to see any significant evolutionary change during their own lifetime.

Read the full piece in ORBITER magazine…

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…