Related papers: Evidence and Evolution: A Review
Although it has contributed to remarkable improvements in some specific areas, attempts to develop a universal design theory are generally characterized by failure. This paper sketches arguments for a new approach to engineering design…
Jim Shapiro synthesizes a great many observations about the mechanisms of evolution to reach the remarkable conclusion that large-scale modification, exchange, and rearrangement of the genome are common and should be viewed as fundamental…
It has been hypothesized that one of the main reasons evolution has been able to produce such impressive adaptations is because it has improved its own ability to evolve -- "the evolution of evolvability". Rupert Riedl, for example, an…
For many decades, statisticians have made attempts to prepare the Bayesian omelette without breaking the Bayesian eggs; that is, to obtain probabilistic likelihood-based inferences without relying on informative prior distributions. 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…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
With unprecedented advances in genetic engineering we are starting to see progressively more original examples of synthetic life. As such organisms become more common it is desirable to be able to distinguish between natural and artificial…
These lectures contain a brief description of evolutionary models inspired by the statistical mechanics of disordered systems. After an introduction describing the Darwinian paradigm of evolving populations, the deterministic quasispecies…
A substantial school in the philosophy of science identifies Bayesian inference with inductive inference and even rationality as such, and seems to be strengthened by the rise and practical success of Bayesian statistics. We argue that the…
We consider the hypothesis that Evolution promotes population-wide genome patterns that, under randomization, ensures the External Validity of adaptations across population members. An adaptation is Externally Valid (EV) if its effect holds…
Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health, to sports, business, and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence-believing…
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…
The evolutionary origins of ageing and age-associated diseases continue to pose a fundamental question in biology. This study is concerned with a recently proposed framework, which conceptualises development and ageing as a continuous…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
One way to understand the role history plays on evolutionary trajectories is by giving ancient life a second opportunity to evolve. Our ability to empirically perform such an experiment, however, is limited by current experimental designs.…
What is the productivity of Science? Can we measure an evolution of the production of mathematicians over history? Can we predict the waiting time till the proof of a challenging conjecture such as the P-versus-NP problem? Motivated by…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Selection shapes all kinds of behaviors, including how we make decisions under uncertainty. The risk attitude reflected from it should be simple, flexible, yet consistent. In this paper we engaged evolutionary dynamics to find the decision…