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[…]

“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,[…]