Wandering Wim's Blog

“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,[…]

Autocatalytic sets are self-sustaining chemical reaction networks which are believed to have played an important role in the origin of life, and to be an underlying principle of living systems in general. They have been studied in great[…]

Standard economic theory assumes that humans behave fully rationally and are able to objectively calculate the value (or cost) of the different choices they are presented with. In fact, we pride ourselves on our rationality. Different from the[…]

Schumann resonances (SR) are global electromagnetic resonances generated by lightning in the cavity between the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere. Their existence was predicted mathematically in 1952. However, it took another decade before they could be reliably measured[…]