Biospheric Evolution Is Coarsely Deterministic

Late Archean biospheric oxygenation and atmospheric evolution.

High-resolution geochemical analyses of organic-rich shale and carbonate through the 2500 million-year-old Mount McRae Shale in the Hamersley Basin of northwestern Australia record changes in both the oxidation state of the surface ocean and the atmospheric composition. The Mount McRae record of sulfur isotopes captures the widespread and possibly permanent activation of the oxidative sulfur cy...

Evolution of Photosynthesis and Biospheric Oxygenation Contingent Upon Nitrogen Fixation?

How photosynthesis by Precambrian cyanobacteria oxygenated Earth’s biosphere remains incompletely understood. Here it is argued that the oxic transition, which took place between approximately 2.3 Gyr and 0.5 Gyr ago, required a great proliferation of cyanobacteria, and this in turn depended on their ability to fix nitrogen via the nitrogenase enzyme system. However, the ability to fix nitrogen...

Deterministic Tumor Evolution

The Late Archean Biospheric Explosion

biogenic platform carbonates [4]. By c.2.45 Ga oxygen levels had begun to rise in the Earth’s atmosphere setting the stage for the evolution of the modern biosphere. Here we focus on concretionary structures, which can act as sensitive barometers of biological activity, to provide us with potential insights into the expansion of this early biosphere prior to the first appearance of oxygen in th...

Nonlinear deterministic equations in biological evolution

We review models of biological evolution in which the population frequency changes deterministically with time. If the population is selfreplicating, although the equations for simple prototypes can be linearised, nonlinear equations arise in many complex situations. For sexual populations, even in the simplest setting, the equations are necessarily nonlinear due to the mixing of the parental g...