The Dependency Graph of Life
Abstract
The hierarchical classification of life has been claimed as compelling evidence for universal common ancestry. However, research has uncovered much data which is not congruent with the hierarchical pattern. Nevertheless, biological data resembles a nested hierarchy sufficiently well to require an explanation. While many defenders of intelligent design dispute common descent, no alternative account of the approximate nested hierarchy pattern has been widely adopted. We present the dependency graph hypothesis as an alternative explanation, based on the technique used by software developers to reuse code among different software projects. This hypothesis postulates that different biological species share modules related by a dependency graph. We evaluate several predictions made by this model about both biological and synthetic data, finding them to be fulfilled.Downloads
Figures/Supplementary Files
- Figure 1
- Figure 2
- Figure 3
- Figure 4
- Figure 5
- Figure 6
- Figure 7
- Figure 8
- Figure 9
- Figure 10
- Figure 11
- Figure 12
- Figure 13
- Figure 14
- Supplementary File 2
- Supplementary File 3
- Supplementary File 4
- Supplementary File 5
- Supplementary File 6
- Supplementary File 7
- Supplementary File 8
- Supplementary File 9
- Supplementary File 10
- Supplementary File 11
- Supplementary File 12
- Supplementary File 14
- Supplementary File 15
- Supplementary File 17
- Supplementary File 18
- Supplementary File 19
- Supplementary File 22
- Supplementary File 23
- Supplementary File 24
- Supplementary File 25
- Supplementary File 26
- Supplementary File 27
- Supplementary File 28
- Supplementary File 29
- Supplementary File 30
- Supplementary File 31
- Supplementary File 32
- Supplementary File 33
- Supplementary File 1
- Supplementary File 13
- Supplementary File 16
- Supplementary File 20
- Supplementary File 21
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish in BIO-Complexity agree to the following terms:
Authors retain copyright and grant BIO-Complexity the right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows others to share the work, provided they acknowledgement the work's authorship and initial publication in BIO-Complexity.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of BIO-Complexity's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in BIO-Complexity.
Because you the author (including any co-authors) will claim copyrights for the final version of your work published in BIO-Complexity, you are responsible for ensuring that you are entitled to make this claim. In particular, you here certify that no one other than you or your co-author(s) holds the copyright to any figure or figure component included in this submission.
