Biology

Recommended
Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, Agota Toth (2000): "Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism" pdf
(In which slime mould is shown to be able to solve shortest path problems)

Animal Behavior

Biro et al. (2003): "Cultural innovation and transmission of tool use in wild chimpanzees: evidence from field experiments" link
Milinsky (1987): "TIT FOR TAT in sticklebacks and the evolution of cooperation" link

Computational Biology

Dubuis et al. (2013): "Positional information, in bits" link

Evolutionary Biology

MacLean et al (2014): "The evolution of self-control" link
summary
Scientists do not know whether absolute brain size of relative brain size supported cognitive evolution. Furthermore, we do not know which of the two main hypotheses for selective pressures leading to cognitive evolution is more viable: complex social structures (as evidenced by larger group sizes) or dietary complexity (as evidenced by diversity of diet). This paper conducted a massive study comparing cognitive abilities of many species to try to clarify this situation. The paper uses two tasks: in one, the experimenters train the animals to find food in location A then at test time show the animals that the food moves to location B and allow the animals to find the food. In the second task, the animals were familiarized with finding food in an opaque cylander, then at test time the animals were given the food in a transparent cylander, so they would have to resist the urge to grab directly for the food. These tasks contrast nicely because in the first task, the animals have to inhibit their trained response, while in the second needed to activate their trained response. Performance on these two tasks across species was highly correlated. The authors find that when investigating hypotheses for anatomical support for cognition, absolute brain size explained most variation in performance across species. The authors also found that dietary diversity was more correlated with performance than social group size.

Wilson (1975): "A Theory of Group Selection" pdf

Genetics

*Krotov et al. (2013): "Morphogenesis at criticality?" link

Systems Biology

*Afek et al. (2011): "A Biological Solution to a Fundamental Distributed Computing Problem" link
Napp and Adams (2013): "Message Passing Inference with Chemical Reaction Networks" pdf
*Navlakha (2011): "Algorithms in nature: the convergence of systems biology and computational thinking" link
Peter M Krafft Last modified: Mon Dec 29 12:05:06 EST 2014