research interests include evolution and learning in games and the economics of technological standardization. Abstract We survey three classes of models from evolutionary game theory which make history independent predictions: stochastic stability, stochastic stability with local interaction, and cheap talk. We argue that of the three, only local interaction models yield credible history indep...

Translation and the Origin of Life Current theories on the origin of life envision an RNA World as the culmination of chemical evolution. The extent of this RNA World, and the biochemical complexity of the progenotes that populated it, is subject to much debate. It, nevertheless, is likely a point of agreement among workers in the field that the discovery of machinery for the chiral synthesis o...

Extinction episodes, such as the anthropogenic one currently under way, result in a pruned tree of life. But what fraction of the underlying evolutionary history survives when k of n species in a taxon are lost? This is relevant both to how species loss has translated into a loss of evolutionary history and to assigning conservation priorities. Here it is shown that approximately 80 percent of ...

several open questions. Most pertinently: how do ants encode skyline information? And, how do ants derive a movement direction from the comparison of their current skyline view and their remembered view? Recent experiments, also with M. bagoti [10], have addressed the first question. By masking different portions of the visual panorama, it was possible to show that being able to view prominent ...

4.5SH RNA is a 94-nt small RNAwith unknown function. This RNA is known to be present in the mouse, rat, and hamster cells; however, it is not found in human, rabbit, and chicken. In the mouse genome, the 4.5SH RNA gene is a part of a long (4.2 kb) tandem repeat (;800 copies) unit. Here, we found that 4.5SH RNA genes are present only in rodents of six families that comprise the Myodonta clade: M...

Unlike bones, behavior does not fossilize, so it is hard to infer the evolutionary history of social traits. However, we have shown elsewhere that Bayesian phylogenetic methods allow the investigation of ancestral states and models of evolution of social grouping behaviour in primates. Here, we extend this analysis to another significant aspect of primate social life, which may be subject to di...

The TATA binding protein (TBP) is an essential transcription initiation factor in Archaea and Eucarya. Bacteria lack TBP, and instead use sigma factors for transcription initiation. TBP has a symmetric structure comprising two repeated TBP domains. Using sequence, structural and phylogenetic analyses, we examine the distribution and evolutionary history of the TBP domain, a member of the helix-...

The particular Requirements Engineering (RE) process modeling approach being presented in this paper advocates the capture of the history of RE artifacts. An artifact is viewed as an Evolutionary Object which evolves as the RE process proceeds. The paper proposes a classification of the various kinds of evolution of artifacts and presents a generic model, the Evolutionary Object Model, to struc...

The Earth's evolutionary history is threatened by species loss in the current sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history. Such extinction events not only eliminate species but also their unique evolutionary histories. Here we review the expected loss of Earth's evolutionary history quantified by phylogenetic diversity (PD) and evolutionary distinctiveness (ED) at risk. Due to the general pa...