Related papers: Darwinian Dynamics Implies Developmental Ascendenc…
It has been hypothesized that in the era just before the last universal common ancestor emerged, life on earth was fundamentally collective. Ancient life forms shared their genetic material freely through massive horizontal gene transfer…
Natural evolution gives the impression of leading to an open-ended process of increasing diversity and complexity. If our goal is to produce such open-endedness artificially, this suggests an approach driven by evolutionary metaphor. On the…
We propose a class of evolutionary models that involves an arbitrary exchangeable process as the breeding process and different selection schemes. In those models, a new genome is born according to the breeding process, and then a genome is…
The natural evolution of life seems to proceed through steps characterized by phases of relatively rapid changes, followed by longer, more stable periods. In the light of the string-theory derived physical scenario proposed in [1], we…
There is a compelling intellectual case for exploring whether purely unitary quantum theory defines a sensible and scientifically adequate theory, as Everett originally proposed. Many different and incompatible attempts to define a coherent…
Simonton is attempting to salvage the Blind Variation Selective Retention theory of creativity (often referred to as the Darwinian theory of creativity) by dissociating it from Darwinism. This is a necessary move for complex reasons…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
The structure of a society depends, to some extent, on the incentives of the individuals they are composed of. We study a stylized model of this interplay, that suggests that the more individuals aim at climbing the social hierarchy, the…
In the realm of evolutionary game theory, standard frameworks typically presuppose that every player possesses comprehensive knowledge and unrestricted access to the entire strategy space. However, real-world human society inherently…
Disentangling the mechanisms underlying the social network evolution is one of social science's unsolved puzzles. Preferential attachment is a powerful mechanism explaining social network dynamics, yet not able to explain all scaling-laws…
In previous work I proposed a framework for thinking about open-ended evolution. The framework characterised the basic processes required for Darwinian evolution as: (1) the generation of a phenotype from a genetic description; (2) the…
Rock is wrapped by paper, paper is cut by scissors, and scissors are crushed by rock. This simple game is popular among children and adults to decide on trivial disputes that have no obvious winner, but cyclic dominance is also at the heart…
Protein evolution underpins life, and understanding its behavior as a system is of great importance. However, our current models of protein evolution are arguably too simplistic to allow quantitative interpretation and prediction of…
Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…
Objections to Darwinian evolution are often based on the time required to carry out the necessary mutations. Seemingly, exponential numbers of mutations are needed. We show that such estimates ignore the effects of natural selection, and…
How cooperation emerges in human societies is both an evolutionary enigma, and a practical problem with tangible implications for societal health. Population structure has long been recognized as a catalyst for cooperation because local…
Notions of Darwinian selection have been implicit in economic theory for at least sixty years. Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter have argued that while evolutionary thinking was prevalent in prewar economics, the postwar Neoclassical school…
This article critically examines the foundational principles of contemporary AI methods, exploring the limitations that hinder its potential. We draw parallels between the modern AI landscape and the 20th-century Modern Synthesis in…
In this review, we discuss the applications of the theory of birth-and-death processes to problems in biology, primarily, those of evolutionary genomics. The mathematical principles of the theory of these processes are briefly described.…
Aim of this paper is to provide preliminary elements for discussion about the implications of the Hierarchy Theory of Evolution on the design and evolution of artificial systems and socio-technical organizations. In order to achieve this…