The platypus: evolutionary history, biology, and an uncertain future

The Future of Evolutionary Biology

Mesenchymal Stem Cells: History, Isolation and Biology

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) as a kind of adult stem cells possess two properties of long term selfrenewal ability and multilineage differentiation potential into skeletal cell lineages. MSCs were first isolated and described from bone marrow samples. Further investigations have identified several other tissues as alternative sources for these cells. In spite of the clinical importance of MSCs...

Discounting an uncertain future

The objective of this paper is to determine the socially optimal discount rate for public investment projects that entail costs and benefits in the very long run. We suppose that there is an exogenous process for the growth of consumption per capita, which is stochastic. We first evaluate the determinants of the discount rate for a specific horizon when the representative agent has a recursive ...

Optimization in Uncertain and Complex Dynamic Environments with Evolutionary Methods

In the real world, many of the optimization issues are dynamic, uncertain, and complex in which the objective function or constraints can be changed over time. Consequently, the optimum of these issues is changed nonlinearly. Therefore, the optimization algorithms not only should search the global optimum value in the space but also should follow the path of optimal change in dynamic environmen...

Saving for an uncertain future.

T he units that are subject to selection pressure in evolutionary biology are ‘‘strategies,’’ which are conditional actions (for example, do P if X occurs; otherwise do Q). In contrast, the units in economics (they are called ‘‘people’’) select strategies from available menus so as to further their projects and purposes. If evolutionary dynamics involves mindless competition among strategies, e...