Wandering Wim's 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[…]

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[…]

“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[…]

“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[…]

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[…]

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,[…]