Creating a foundation for origin of life outreach: How scientists relate to their field, the public, and religion.

Origins of life research is particularly challenging to communicate because of the tension between its many disciplines and its nearness to traditionally philosophical or religious questions. To authentically represent scientists' perspective in a museum exhibition, we interviewed 46 researchers from diverse backgrounds. We investigated how they perceive their field, science communication, and the relation with religion.

Eco-evolutionary dynamics of a population with randomly switching carrying capacity.

Environmental variability greatly influences the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a population, i.e. it affects how its size and composition evolve.

Interactions mediated by a public good transiently increase cooperativity in growing Pseudomonas putida metapopulations.

Bacterial communities have rich social lives. A well-established interaction involves the exchange of a public good in Pseudomonas populations, where the iron-scavenging compound pyoverdine, synthesized by some cells, is shared with the rest. Pyoverdine thus mediates interactions between producers and non-producers and can constitute a public good.

Evolution of a Fluctuating Population in a Randomly Switching Environment.

Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an environment that randomly switches between states of abundance and scarcity. Assuming that one strain grows slightly faster than the other, we consider two scenarios-one of pure resource competition, and one in which one strain provides a public good-and investigate how environmental randomness (external noise) coupled to demographic (internal) noise determines the population's fixation properties and size distribution.

Non-Selective Evolution of Growing Populations.

Non-selective effects, like genetic drift, are an important factor in modern conceptions of evolution, and have been extensively studied for constant population sizes (Kimura, 1955; Otto and Whitlock, 1997). Here, we consider non-selective evolution in the case of growing populations that are of small size and have varying trait compositions (e.g.