Ideas that Drove DCRP

On the Free Energy That Drove Primordial Anabolism

A key problem in understanding the origin of life is to explain the mechanism(s) that led to the spontaneous assembly of molecular building blocks that ultimately resulted in the appearance of macromolecular structures as they are known in modern biochemistry today. An indispensable thermodynamic prerequisite for such a primordial anabolism is the mechanistic coupling to processes that supplied...

Iso-luminance counterillumination drove bioluminescent shark radiation

Counterilluminating animals use ventral photogenic organs (photophores) to mimic the residual downwelling light and cloak their silhouette from upward-looking predators. To cope with variable conditions of pelagic light environments they typically adjust their luminescence intensity. Here, we found evidence that bioluminescent sharks instead emit a constant light output and move up and down in ...

What drove the evolution of endothermy?

The metabolic production of heat and high, stable body temperatures characteristic of birds and mammals was a major step in the evolution of vertebrate animals; however, the 1979 paper by Albert Bennett and John Ruben (Bennett and Ruben, 1979) represented a fundamental shift in thinking about the problem of the evolution of endothermy. They argued that endothermy based on thermoregulatory consi...

Ideas That Stand the [evolutionary] Test of Time

Evolutionary psychology, memetics and models of cultural evolution focus on reproductive success. I will argue that fitness should in fact focus on differential persistence of entities instead of differential reproductive success of replicators. Understanding evolution as such shifts the nature of adaptation from reproduction to persistence, changing the means by which representational powers w...

What Drove 19 Century Market Integration?