Related papers: On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution

Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…

Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…

The problem of the rate and mechanisms of biological evolution was considered. It was shown that species could not be formed due to undirected mutations in characteristic times of about one million years. A mechanism of deterministic…

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…

In the {\em Many Worlds Interpretation} of quantum mechanics, the range of possible worlds (or histories) provides variation, and the Anthropic Principle is a selective principle analogous to natural selection. When looked on in this way,…

Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…

Darwin's theory of evolution emphasized that positive selection of functional proficiency provides the fitness that ultimately determines the structure of life, a view that has dominated biochemical thinking of enzymes as perfectly…

Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for…

Evolution by natural selection, which is one of the most compelling themes of modern science, brought forth evolutionary algorithms and evolutionary computation, applying mechanisms of evolution in nature to various problems solved by…

The scientific community believes in the theory of evolution with a passion that rivals that of any religious belief. This passion extends beyond the irrefutable evidence of the fossil record to the familiar claims of survival of the…

This paper motivates the study of decision theory as necessary for aligning smarter-than-human artificial systems with human interests. We discuss the shortcomings of two standard formulations of decision theory, and demonstrate that they…

The idea that all life on earth traces back to a common beginning dates back at least to Charles Darwin's {\em Origin of Species}. Ever since, biologists have tried to piece together parts of this `tree of life' based on what we can observe…

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…

Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…

Darwinism conceives evolution as a consequence of random variation and natural selection, hence it is based on a materialistic, i.e. matter-based, view of science inspired by classical physics. But matter in itself is considered a very…

The most common assumption in evolutionary game theory is that players should adopt a strategy that warrants the highest payoff. However, recent studies indicate that the spatial selection for cooperation is enhanced if an appropriate…

We consider the dynamics imposed by natural selection on the populations of two competing, sexually reproducing, haploid species. In this setting, the fitness of any genome varies over time due to the changing population mix of the…

We argue that in Universes where future and past differ only by the entropy content a psychological arrow of time pointing in the direction of entropy increase can arise from natural selection in biological evolution. We show that this…

An influential argument for scientific realism posits that, if scientific theories were not true, their empirical success would be a coincidence. Here, I show that the false Drude's theory succeeds in explaining the Wiedemann-Franz law by…

The learning dynamics of biological brains and artificial neural networks are of interest to both neuroscience and machine learning. A key difference between them is that neural networks are often trained from a randomly initialized state…