This tutorial will review the basics of theory in the field of evolutionary quantitative genetics and its connections to evolution observed at various time scales. Quantitative genetics deals with the inheritance of measurements of traits that are affected by many genes. Quantitative genetic theory for natural populations was developed considerably in the period from 1970 to 1990 and up to the present, and it has been applied to a wide range of phenomena including the evolution of differences between the sexes, sexual preferences, life history traits, plasticity of traits, as well as the evolution of body size and other morphological measurements. Textbooks have not kept pace with these developments, and currently few universities offer courses in this subject aimed at evolutionary biologists. There is a need for evolutionary biologists to understand this field because of the ability to collect large amounts of data by computer, the development of statistical methods for changes of traits on evolutionary trees and for changes in a single species through time, and the realization that quantitative characters will not soon be fully explained by genomics. This tutorial aims to fill this need by reviewing basic aspects of theory and illustrating how that theory can be tested with data, both from single species and with multiple-species phylogenies. Participants will learn to use R, an open-source statistical programming language, to build and test evolutionary models. The intended participants for this tutorial are graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty members in evolutionary biology.
Tag: ITBio
Network Science by Albert-László Barabási
The textbook is available for purchase in September 2016 from Cambridge University Press. Pre-order now on Amazon.com.
If you’re not already doing so, you should follow Barabási on Twitter.
Its beautiful! Help me share the good news! Available here https://t.co/ZGuO06dV74 and here https://t.co/BCwq9PBLlZ. pic.twitter.com/8mnV0SOVWw
— Laszlo Barabasi (@barabasi) August 3, 2016
Disconnected, Fragmented, or United? A Trans-disciplinary Review of Network Science
Abstract
During decades the study of networks has been divided between the efforts of social scientists and natural scientists, two groups of scholars who often do not see eye to eye. In this review I present an effort to mutually translate the work conducted by scholars from both of these academic fronts hoping to continue to unify what has become a diverging body of literature. I argue that social and natural scientists fail to see eye to eye because they have diverging academic goals. Social scientists focus on explaining how context specific social and economic mechanisms drive the structure of networks and on how networks shape social and economic outcomes. By contrast, natural scientists focus primarily on modeling network characteristics that are independent of context, since their focus is to identify universal characteristics of systems instead of context specific mechanisms. In the following pages I discuss the differences between both of these literatures by summarizing the parallel theories advanced to explain link formation and the applications used by scholars in each field to justify their approach to network science. I conclude by providing an outlook on how these literatures can be further unified.
Weekly Recap: Interesting Articles 7/24-7/31 2016
Science & Math
- Context Specific and Differential Gene Co-expression Networks via Bayesian Biclustering | PLOS Computational Biology
- The Competing Incentives of Academic Research in Mathematics
- [1607.08473] Quantum circuits and low-degree polynomials over F_2
- This Physics Pioneer Walked Away from it All | Nautilus
- Monumental proof to torment mathematicians for years to come: Conference on Shinichi Mochizuki’s work inspires cautious optimism. | Nature
- What Your Brain Looks Like When It Solves a Math Problem | New York Times
- Habits of Highly Mathematical People
- Why You Should Care About High-Dimensional Sphere Packing | Roots of Unity
- Initial steps toward reproducible research
- Bridging the Curation Gap between Research and Libraries – A Case Study
- Quantum steampunk: Quantum information applied to thermodynamics
- How Vector Space Mathematics Reveals the Hidden Sexism in Language
- How Sound Can Make Food Taste Better | Nautilus
- Top 10 algorithms of 20th century numerical analysis, from a talk by Alex Townsend
- UK vs. US: Who’s got the right way to teach math(s)? | Math with Bad Drawin
- Physics & Caffeine: Stop Motion Film Uses a Cup of Coffee to Explain Key Co
- The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China by Philip Ball (review)
- The master of them all: Book review for”Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment” | The Economist
- Biologists Search for New Model Organisms: The bulk of biological research is centered on a handful of species. Are we missing a huge chunk of life’s secrets?
- One-sentence proof of Fermat’s theorem on sums of two squares | Fermat’s Library
- This protein designer aims to revolutionize medicines and materials
- Our last common ancestor inhaled hydrogen from underwater volcanoes
- Meet Luca, The Ancestor of All Living Things | New York Times
- *Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network
- What’s Behind A Science vs. Philosophy Fight? | Big Think
- What is a “Neutral Network” Anyway? An Exploration and Rediscovery of the Aims of Net Neutrality in Theory and Practice
- The Brachistochrone Curve: The Problem of Quickest Descent | Fermat’s Library
- In what sense is Quantum Mechanics a theory of information? | Quora
- Major transitions in information technology | Philosophical Transactions of
- Human brain mapped in unprecedented detail: Nearly 100 previously unidentified brain areas revealed by examination of the cerebral cortex. | Nature
- Cell biologists should specialize, not hybridize: Dry cell biologists, who bridge computer science and cell biology, should have a pivotal role in driving effective team science, says Assaf Zaritsky | Nature
- Internet 3.0: How we take back control from the giants | New Scientist
- How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology | The Atlantic
- People can sense single photons | Nature News & Comment
- Defining synergy thermodynamically using quantitative measurements of entropy and free energy
- A Prime Case of Chaos | AMS.org
- Murray Gell-Mann (video interviews) – YouTube
- Mathematics & Chalk: A teary goodbye to Hagomoro | Jeremy Kun
Publishing
- Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No | Chronicle
- Textbooks Show Aging Signs: Curated Guides Are Next – 10+ Disruptive Factors Transforming the World of Education and Learning — Consequences, Opportunities, Tools
- Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Random House Don’t Want to Talk About Their Ebook Sales
- Amazon Sales Rank: Taming the Algorithm | Self-Publishing Author Advice
- What Authors Should Know About Advance Review Copies
- Ingram Launches Ingram Academic Services
- How a Publishing House Designs a Book Cover
- How Indie Bookstores Help Drive Book Discoverability
- How to Grow Your Email List
- 3 Ways Indie Publishers Sell Books | Digital Book World
- 10 Self-Publishing Trends to Watch
- Ingram Launches Academic Services for University Presses and Academic Publishers
- Indigo Goes Where Amazon, B&N, Goodreads, and a Dozen Publishers and Startus Have Dared to Tread
- How To Make An Ebook Feel More Like A Real Book
- Looking for open digital collections – Wynken de Worde
Indieweb, Internet, Identity, Blogging, Social Media
- What is Open Source?
- Microformats with Tantek Çelik | tlks.io https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDQigkxyiqE
- My Text Editor is Absolutely Sublime | Devon Zuegel
- My zsh aliases | Devon Zuegel
- XOXO Festival
- Web Design in 4 minutes
- Custom Elements
- Design Principles
- Infographic: The Optimal Length for Every Social Media Update
- Notes For New (and Potential) Twitter Followers | Whatever
- How Blogs Work Today – Whatever
- My reply to: How Blogs Work Today | Whatever
- Unicode Character ‘ZERO WIDTH SPACE’ (U 200B)
- A Book Apart, Practical SVG
- Gillmor Gang Trumpathon
- The best news aggregation service – The Sweet Setup
- Social Startup Sprinklr Is Now Valued At $1.8 Billion After $105 Million Raise | Forbes
- Epeus’ epigone: Digital publics, Conversations and Twitter
General
- The New Meaning of Success
- 7 Lessons from the Future of Content: Part One — Tools Are Cheap, Time Is Expensive
- 7 Lessons from the Future of Content: Part Two — Let’s Play Risk
- Aron Pilhofer Joining Temple University School of Media and Communication
- Secrets and agents: George Akerlof’s 1970 paper, “The Market for Lemons”, is a foundation stone of information economics. The first in our series on seminal economic ideas | The Economist
- John Oliver has the takedown of Donald Trump’s Republican convention
- Reference: New Interactive Map Of 100,000 Photos and Videos Reveal “Lost London in the Victorian Era”
- “better modifiers than “insane(ly)” (Grammar and Usage)
- A lesson in the errors of statistical thinking: Nate Silver on Trump
- Trump & Putin. Yes, It’s Really a Thing
- Charlie Parker Plays with Dizzy Gillespie in Only Footage Capturing the “Bird” in True Live Performance
- Let Me Remind You Fuckers Who I Am (Shit HRC Can’t Say/satire)
Ten Simple Rules for Taking Advantage of Git and GitHub
Bioinformatics is a broad discipline in which one common denominator is the need to produce and/or use software that can be applied to biological data in different contexts. To enable and ensure the replicability and traceability of scientific claims, it is essential that the scientific publication, the corresponding datasets, and the data analysis are made publicly available [1,2]. All software used for the analysis should be either carefully documented (e.g., for commercial software) or, better yet, openly shared and directly accessible to others [3,4]. The rise of openly available software and source code alongside concomitant collaborative development is facilitated by the existence of several code repository services such as SourceForge, Bitbucket, GitLab, and GitHub, among others. These resources are also essential for collaborative software projects because they enable the organization and sharing of programming tasks between different remote contributors. Here, we introduce the main features of GitHub, a popular web-based platform that offers a free and integrated environment for hosting the source code, documentation, and project-related web content for open-source projects. GitHub also offers paid plans for private repositories (see Box 1) for individuals and businesses as well as free plans including private repositories for research and educational use.
Design and Control of Self-organizing Systems
Complex systems are usually difficult to design and control. There are several particular methods for coping with complexity, but there is no general approach to build complex systems. In this book I propose a methodology to aid engineers in the design and control of complex systems. This is based on the description of systems as self-organizing. Starting from the agent metaphor, the methodology proposes a conceptual framework and a series of steps to follow to find proper mechanisms that will promote elements to find solutions by actively interacting among themselves.
Penguin Revives Decades-Old Software for 30th Anniversary Edition of “The Blind Watchmaker” | The Digital Reader
Even in 2016, publishers and authors are still struggling when it comes to re-releasing decades-old books, but Penguin had a unique problem when it set out to publish a 30th anniversary edition of Richard Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker.<br /><br />The Bookseller reports that Penguin decided to revive four programs Dawkins wrote in 1986. Written in Pascal for the Mac, The Watchmaker Suite was an experiment in algorithmic evolution. Users could run the programs and create a biomorph, and then watch it evolve across the generations.<br /><br />And now you can do the same in your web browser.<br /><br />A website, MountImprobable.com, was built by the publisher’s in-house Creative Technology team—comprising community manager Claudia Toia, creative developer Mathieu Triay and cover designer Matthew Young—who resuscitated and redeployed code Dawkins wrote in the 1980s and ’90s to enable users to create unique, “evolutionary” imprints. The images will be used as cover imagery on Dawkins’ trio to grant users an entirely individual, personalised print copy.
A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life | Quanta Magazine
Jeremy England, a 31-year-old physicist at MIT, thinks he has found the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution of life.
- Jeremy L. England Lab
- Talks
- Statistical physics of self-replication, Jeremy L. England; J. Chem. Phys. 139, 121923 (2013); doi: 10.1063/1.4818538
- Statistical Physics of Adaptation, Nikolai Perunov, Robert Marsland, and Jeremy England, arXiv, December 8, 2014
- Entropy production fluctuation theorem and the nonequilibrium work relation for free energy differences, Gavin E. Crooks, arXiv, February 1, 2008
- Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics, E.D. Schneider, J.J. Kay, doi:10.1016/0895-7177(94)90188-0, Mathematical and Computer Modelling, Volume 19, Issues 6–8, March–April 1994, Pages 25-48
Hypothesis annotations
Bits from Brains for Biologically Inspired Computing | Computational Intelligence
Inspiration for artificial biologically inspired computing is often drawn from neural systems. This article shows how to analyze neural systems using information theory with the aim of obtaining constraints that help to identify the algorithms run by neural systems and the information they represent. Algorithms and representations identified this way may then guide the design of biologically inspired computing systems. The material covered includes the necessary introduction to information theory and to the estimation of information-theoretic quantities from neural recordings. We then show how to analyze the information encoded in a system about its environment, and also discuss recent methodological developments on the question of how much information each agent carries about the environment either uniquely or redundantly or synergistically together with others. Last, we introduce the framework of local information dynamics, where information processing is partitioned into component processes of information storage, transfer, and modification – locally in space and time. We close by discussing example applications of these measures to neural data and other complex systems.
My Review Copy of The Big Picture by Sean Carroll
One thing I will mention is that it’s got quite a bit more philosophy in it than most popular science books with such a physics bent. Those who aren’t already up to speed on the math and science of modern physics can certainly benefit from the book (like most popular science books of its stripe, it doesn’t have any equations — hairy or otherwise), and it’s certain to help many toward becoming members of both of C.P. Snow’s two cultures. It might not be the best place for mathematicians and physicists to start moving toward the humanities with the included philosophy as the philosophy is very light and spotty in places and the explanations of the portions they’re already aware of may put them out a bit.
I’m most interested to see how he views complexity and thinking in the final portion of the text.
More detail to come…
How Can We Apply Physics to Biology?
We don’t yet know quite what a physics of biology will consist of. But we won’t understand life without it.
Happy 100th Birthday Claude Shannon
Overview of Shannon’s Work
Most importantly, Shannon, in his 1937 Master’s Thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology applied George Boole’s algebra (better known now as Boolean Algebra) to electric circuits thereby making the modern digital revolution possible. To give you an idea of how far we’ve come, the typical high school student can now read and understand all of its content. If you’d like to give it a try, you can download it from MIT’s website.
His other huge accomplishment was a journal article he wrote in 1948 entitled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in the Bell Labs Journal. When it was republished a year later, one of the most notable changes was in the new title “The Mathematical Theory of Communication.” While copies of the original article are freely available on the internet, the more casual reader will appreciate the more recent edition from MIT Press which also includes a fabulous elucidative and extensive opening written by Warren Weaver. This paper contains the theoretical underpinning that allowed for the efflorescence of all modern digital communication to occur. It ranks as one of the most influential and far-reaching documents in human history rivaling even the Bible.
Further, my own excitement in Shannon stems in part from his Ph.D. thesis “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics” (1940) which has inspired most of the theoretical material I’m always contemplating.
Additional Sources:
For those looking for more information try some of the following (non-technical) sources:
- Wikipedia: Claude Shannon
- Siobhan Roberts has a nice short article “Claude Shannon, the Father of the Information Ages, Turns 1100100” in today’s New Yorker. It coincidentally also mentions an anecdote involving my friend Sol Golomb at the end.
- James Gleick, author of Chaos and Genius, recently wrote the book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood which is very accessible to the non-specialist.
Some light poolside reading
Instagram filter used: Clarendon
Photo taken at:Gerrish Swim & Tennis Club
Introduction to Information Theory | SFI’s Complexity Explorer
Introduction to Information Theory
About the Tutorial:
This tutorial introduces fundamental concepts in information theory. Information theory has made considerable impact in complex systems, and has in part co-evolved with complexity science. Research areas ranging from ecology and biology to aerospace and information technology have all seen benefits from the growth of information theory.
In this tutorial, students will follow the development of information theory from bits to modern application in computing and communication. Along the way Seth Lloyd introduces valuable topics in information theory such as mutual information, boolean logic, channel capacity, and the natural relationship between information and entropy.
Lloyd coherently covers a substantial amount of material while limiting discussion of the mathematics involved. When formulas or derivations are considered, Lloyd describes the mathematics such that less advanced math students will find the tutorial accessible. Prerequisites for this tutorial are an understanding of logarithms, and at least a year of high-school algebra.
About the Instructor(s):
Professor Seth Lloyd is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1982, the Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics (Part III) and an M. Phil. in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University in 1983 and 1984 under a Marshall Fellowship, and a Ph.D. in Physics in 1988 from Rockefeller University under the supervision of Professor Heinz Pagels.
From 1988 to 1991, Professor Lloyd was a postdoctoral fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Professor Murray Gell-Mann on applications of information to quantum-mechanical systems. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked at the Center for Nonlinear Systems on quantum computation. In 1994, he joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Since 1988, Professor Lloyd has also been an adjunct faculty member at the Sante Fe Institute.
Professor Lloyd has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon’s noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction.
Professor Lloyd is a member of the American Physical Society and the Amercian Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Tutorial Team:
Yoav Kallus is an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His research at the boundary of statistical physics and geometry looks at how and when simple interactions lead to the formation of complex order in materials and when preferred local order leads to system-wide disorder. Yoav holds a B.Sc. in physics from Rice University and a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University. Before joining the Santa Fe Institute, Yoav was a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science in Princeton University.
How to use Complexity Explorer: How to use Complexity Explore
Prerequisites: At least one year of high-school algebra
Like this tutorial? Donate to help fund more like it
Syllabus
- Introduction
- Forms of Information
- Information and Probability
- Fundamental Formula of Information
- Computation and Logic: Information Processing
- Mutual Information
- Communication Capacity
- Shannon’s Coding Theorem
- The Manifold Things Information Measures
- Homework
Devourer of Encyclopedias: Stanislaw Lem’s “Summa Technologiae”
A review of Summa Technologiae by Stanislaw Lem by David Auerbach from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Summa Technologiae
AT LAST WE have it in English. Summa Technologiae, originally published in Polish in 1964, is the cornerstone of Stanislaw Lem’s oeuvre, his consummate work of speculative nonfiction. Trained in medicine and biology, Lem synthesizes the current science of the day in ways far ahead of most science fiction of the time.
His subjects, among others, include:
- Virtual reality
- Artificial intelligence
- Nanotechnology and biotechnology
- Evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology
- Artificial life
- Information theory
- Entropy and thermodynamics
- Complexity theory, probability, and chaos
- Population and ecological catastrophe
- The “singularity” and “transhumanism”
Source: Devourer of Encyclopedias: Stanislaw Lem’s “Summa Technologiae” – The Los Angeles Review of Books
I came across this book review quite serendipitously today via an Auerbach article in Slate, which I’ve bookmarked. I found a copy of the book and have added it to the top of my reading pile. As I’m currently reading an advance reader edition of Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture, I can only imagine how well the two may go together despite being written nearly 60 years apart.