Sciber

Cool work using information theory to establish upper bounds on information maintenance on organism populations. They "prove a general bound on the rate at which information can accumulate per generation, [finding] that both accumulation and maintenance of information are most efficient (require the least fitness variation per bit) when individual loci experience weak selection. This is relevant for selection on traits influenced by many small-effect loci—a common genetic architecture according to genome-wide association studies." Full paper @ PNAS.

Labels: #evolution, #Genetics, #information, #InformationTheory

"Gulf killifish have made a stunning comeback in Houston with the help of genetic mutations imported from interspecies mating with Atlantic killifish Scientists have suspected that mixing genes through hybridization 'can benefit populations experiencing rapid environmental change,' Clint Muhlfeld, an aquatic ecologist with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) who was not involved in the study, tells The Scientist in an email. 'But to my knowledge this is the first comprehensive study to directly and scientifically support this prediction." The paper itself is another nice example of bioinformatics methods helping understand bioloigy and new phenomena caused by human impact: "Given the limited migration of killifish, recent adaptive introgression was likely mediated by human-assisted transport. We suggest that interspecies connectivity may be an important source of adaptive variation during extreme environmental change." Full news article @ The Scientist and Original Article in Science.

Labels: #Adaptation, #change, #evolution

"Manfred Eigen, who shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for devising a method to time chemical reactions that had been thought too swift to measure, died on Feb. 6 in at his home in Göttingen, Germany. He was 91." Obituary @ NYTimes. Anyone who has taken my courses knows how much I admire his work, and has certainly seen images from his wonderful little book "Steps Towards Life"; a must for anyone interested in understanding how the concept of information is fundamental to understand life and evolution. A giant of Science.

Labels: #evolution, #information, #life

"There is significant momentum building in this area; indeed, we believe evolutionary computation may well be the next big thing in AI technology." Full post at Sentient.

Labels: #DeepLearning, #evolution, #EvolutionaryAlgorithms, #NeuralNetworks, #Neuroevolution

"Revolutionary new methods for extracting, purifying, and sequencing ever-more-ancient DNA have opened an unprecedented window into the history of life on Earth. In just a few decades, the study of ancient DNA has gone from a scientific curiosity to an extremely powerful method for reconstructing past biological phenomena." News article @ The Scientist Magazine®

Labels: #archeology, #DNA, #evolution