Foucault’s Darwinian Genealogy

The genealogy of genealogy of neurons

Two scenarios of neuronal evolution (monophyly and polyphyly) are discussed in the historical timeline starting from the 19th century. The recent genomic studies on Ctenophores re-initiated a broad interest in the hypotheses of independent origins of neurons. However, even earlier work on ctenophores suggested that their nervous systems are unique in many aspects of their organization and a pos...

Darwinian Networks

We suggest Darwinian networks (DNs) as a simplification of working with Bayesian networks (BNs). DNs adapt a handful of wellknown concepts in biology into a single framework that is surprisingly simple, yet remarkably robust. With respect to modeling, on one hand, DNs not only represent BNs, but also faithfully represent the testing of independencies in a more straightforward fashion. On the ot...

Darwinian fitness.

The term Darwinian fitness refers to the capacity of a variant type to invade and displace the resident population in competition for available resources. Classical models of this dynamical process claim that competitive outcome is a deterministic event which is regulated by the population growth rate, called the Malthusian parameter. Recent analytic studies of the dynamics of competition in te...

Darwinian Individuals

A giant graviton genealogy

In this article we extend the construction of giant gravitons from holomorphic surfaces [1] to the ABJM correspondence. We construct a new class of 1 6 -BPS M5-branes wrapping 5-manifolds in S/Zk and supported by a large angular momentum in the orbifold space. These orbifold giant gravitons undergo a supersymmetry enhancement to 1 3 -BPS and 1 2 -BPS configurations in special cases. The compact...