Related papers: On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution
In the article I study the evolutionary adaptivity of two simple population models, based on either altruistic or egoistic law of energy exchange. The computational experiments show the convincing advantage of the altruists, which brings us…
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…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
Well known biological approximations are universal, i.e. invariant to transformations from one species to another. With no other experimental data, such invariance yields exact conservation (with respect to biological diversity and…
In the present article the recent works to formulate laws in Darwinian evolutionary dynamics are discussed. Although there is a strong consensus that general laws in biology may exist, opinions opposing such suggestion are abundant. Based…
Languages and genes are both transmitted from generation to generation, with opportunity for differential reproduction and survivorship of forms. Here we apply a rigorous inference framework, drawn from population genetics, to distinguish…
We study selection acting on phenotype in a collection of agents playing local games lacking Nash equilibria. After each cycle one of the agents losing most games is replaced by a new agent with new random strategy and game partner. The…
It is high time to openly and without finalism define the dangerous but needed term 'purposeful information', whose quantity is an Eigen information value. Using the term 'biological information' in its stead forces one into an…
The controversy concerning both the definition of the species and methods for inferring the boundaries and numbers of species has occupied biologists for centuries, and the debate itself has become known as the species problem. The modern…
Functional decision theory (FDT) is a fairly new mode of decision theory and a normative viewpoint on how an agent should maximize expected utility. The current standard in decision theory and computer science is causal decision theory…
Cooperation is beneficial for the species as a whole, but, at the level of an individual, defection pays off. Natural selection is then expected to favor defectors and eliminate cooperation. This prediction is in stark contrast with the…
Biological systems like long-lived clonal organisms, holobionts and clades challenge traditional evolutionary thinking since they adapt without populations or reproduction. This paper aims to provide an overarching theoretical framework…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
Newton set the stage for our view of how science should be done. We remain in what I will call the `Newtonian Paradigm' in all of physics, including Newton, Einstein, and Schrodinger. As I will show shortly, Newton invented and bequeathed…
It is often stated that there are no laws in biology, where everything is contingent and could have been otherwise, being solely the result of historical accidents. Furthermore, the customary introduction of fundamental biological entities…
Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present…
Here we postulate three laws which form a mathematical framework to capture the essence of Darwinian evolutionary dynamics. The second law is most quantitative and is explicitly expressed by a unique form of stochastic differential…
Genetic drift is stochastic fluctuations of alleles frequencies in a population due to sampling effects. We consider a model of drift in an equilibrium population, with high mutation rates: few functional mutations per generation. Such…
Following the development of the selectionist theory of the immune system, there was an attempt to characterize many biological mechanisms as being "selectionist" as juxtaposed to "instructionist." But this broad definition would group…