Author: Wim

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…

Many systems in nature consist of a large number of relatively simple units that interact only locally, and without a central control, yet the system as a whole can perform sophisticated global information processing, or produce intricate globally coordinated behaviors. A well-known example of this is quorum sensing in microbial communities, where the basic units are bacteria.

Read the full story on TVOL.

Evolutionary biology is a thriving field. This was exemplified very recently at the Second Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology, held in Montpellier, France, from 19-22 August. Attended by around 2700 scientists, there were more than 800 contributed talks, distributed over 78 thematic symposia over the course of four days. This was certainly the largest evolutionary biology meeting ever organized so far.

Read more