In a new paper published in a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, SFI Professor Jessica Flack offers a practical answer to one of the most significant, and most confused questions in evolutionary ...
Mathematics
Nov 17, 2017
5
290
How do decisions get made in the natural world? One possibility is that the individuals or components in biological systems collectively compute solutions to challenges they face in their environments. Consider that fish ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 17, 2018
0
806
Previous studies of flocks, swarms, and schools suggest that animal societies may verge on a "critical" point—in other words, they are extremely sensitive and can be easily tipped into a new social regime. But exactly how ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 10, 2017
2
512
After millions of years of amphibians, dinosaurs, and early mammals ruling the forests and swamps of the hot, humid Mesozoic and early Cenozoic, a new habitat emerged. Small patches of grasslands sprang up and spread as the ...
Evolution
Oct 1, 2015
0
15
Dispersal and adaptation are two fundamental evolutionary strategies available to species given an environment. Generalists, like dandelions, send their offspring far and wide. Specialists, like alpine flowers, adapt to the ...
Evolution
Apr 28, 2015
0
7
Machine learning—a form of artificial intelligence based on the idea that computers can learn from data and make determinations with little help from humans—has the potential to improve our lives in countless ways. From ...
Computer Sciences
Jul 16, 2018
0
55
Throughout life's history on earth, biological diversity has gone through ebbs and flows—periods of rapid evolution and of dramatic extinctions. We know this, at least in part, through the fossil record of marine invertebrates ...
Archaeology
Jun 26, 2019
1
1
In the 18th century, the philosopher David Hume observed that induction—inferring the future based on what's happened in the past—can never be reliable. In 1997, SFI Professor David Wolpert with his colleague Bill Macready ...
Mathematics
Jun 5, 2023
0
45
A team of researchers in the U.S. and U.K. has developed a statistical technique that sorts out when changes to words' pronunciations most likely occurred in the evolutionary history of related languages.
Social Sciences
Feb 20, 2015
0
195
In relatively cool temperatures, Anelosimus studiosus spiders lay their eggs and spin their webs and share their prey in cooperative colonies from Massachusetts to Argentina. Temperatures may vary, but the colonies continue ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 18, 2018
0
352
