All articles tagged with #mathematical biology
A new study by Mauricio González-Forero suggests that human brain expansion may have been driven by energy reallocation from ovarian follicle growth to brain development, rather than direct selection for larger brains. This theory challenges previous ideas that brain size increased due to social or ecological pressures, highlighting the role of reproductive constraints in human evolution.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge, GUST, MIT, Imperial, and the Alan Turing Institute has discovered a surprising connection between number theory and genetics. They found a deep link between the sums-of-digits function from number theory and the phenotype mutational robustness in genetics. This discovery sheds light on the structure of neutral mutations and the evolution of organisms. The researchers also determined that the maximum mutational robustness is proportional to the logarithm of the fraction of all possible sequences that map to a phenotype, with a correction given by the sums of digits function. Additionally, they found a connection between the maximum robustness and the Tagaki function, a fractal function. This unexpected link between pure mathematics and genetics may have important implications for evolutionary genetics.