Related papers: Primordial Evolution in the Finitary Process Soup
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
Evolutionary complexity is here measured by the number of trials/evaluations needed for evolving a logical gate in a non-linear medium. Behavioural complexity of the gates evolved is characterised in terms of cellular automata behaviour. We…
The metabolism is the motor behind the biological complexity of an organism. One problem of characterizing its large-scale structure is that it is hard to know what to compare it to. All chemical reaction systems are shaped by the same…
The true slime mold \textit{Physarum polycephalum} has the remarkable capability to perform self-organized activities such as network formation among food sources. Despite well reproducing the emergence of slime networks, existing models…
For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…
"Self-organization" has become a watchword in developmental biology, characterizing observations in which embryonic or induced stem cells of animals replicate morphological steps and outcomes seen in intact embryos. While the term was…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
We explore the evolution of cooperation in the framework of the evolutionary game theory using the prisoner's dilemma as metaphor of the problem. We present a minimal model taking into account the growing process of the systems and…
Predicting the fate of ecologies is a daunting, albeit extremely important, task. As part of this task one needs to develop an understanding of the organization, hierarchies, and correlations among the species forming the ecology. Focusing…
Like all natural systems, great societies and their cultures emerge by a growth process from their environments, developing, organized, and behaving as wholes with their internal designs linked with their external worlds. So the general…
Communities are ubiquitous in nature and society. Individuals that share common properties often self-organize to form communities. Avoiding the shortages of computation complexity, pre-given information and unstable results in different…
One of the basic assumptions implicit in the way physics is usually done is that all causation flows in a bottom up fashion, from micro to macro scales. However this is wrong in many cases in biology, and in particular in the way the brain…
Recently, it has been proven that evolutionary algorithms produce good results for a wide range of combinatorial optimization problems. Some of the considered problems are tackled by evolutionary algorithms that use a representation which…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…
One of the main goals of Artificial Life is to research the conditions for the emergence of life, not necessarily as it is, but as it could be. Artificial Chemistries are one of the most important tools for this purpose because they provide…
With the rise of computers, simulation models have emerged beside the more traditional statistical and mathematical models as a third pillar for ecological analysis. Broadly speaking, a simulation model is an algorithm, typically…
One strategy for winning a coevolutionary struggle is to evolve rapidly. Most of the literature on host-pathogen coevolution focuses on this phenomenon, and looks for consequent evidence of coevolutionary arms races. An alternative…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…