Related papers: There's plenty of time for evolution
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
The pace of progress in the fields of Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning is currently limited -- in the former field, by the improbability of making advantageous extensions to evolutionary algorithms when their capacity for…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
A default theory can be characterized by its sets of plausible conclusions, called its extensions. But, due to the theoretical complexity of Default Logic (Sigma_2p-complete), the problem of finding such an extension is very difficult if…
Understanding the evolution of a set of genes or species is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology. The problem we study here takes as input a set of trees describing {possibly discordant} evolutionary scenarios for a given set of…
Motivated by present activities in (statistical) physics directed towards biological evolution, we review the interplay of three evolutionary forces: mutation, selection, and genetic drift. The review addresses itself to physicists and…
We study the stochastic evolution of four species in cyclic competition in a well mixed environment. In systems composed of a finite number $N$ of particles these simple interaction rules result in a rich variety of extinction scenarios,…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
An elementary proof is given of the bound on "ortogonalization time".
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
In general-covariant theories the Hamiltonian is a constraint, and hence there is no time evolution; this is the problem of time. In the subcritical free string, the Hamiltonian ceases to be a constraint after quantization due to conformal…
The evolutionary edit distance between two individuals in a population, i.e., the amount of applications of any genetic operator it would take the evolutionary process to generate one individual starting from the other, seems like a…
The equations of evolutionary change by natural selection are commonly expressed in statistical terms. Fisher's fundamental theorem emphasizes the variance in fitness. Quantitative genetics expresses selection with covariances and…
A model of genome evolution is proposed. Based on three assumptions the evolutionary theory of a genome is formulated. The general law on the direction of genome evolution is given. Both the deterministic classical equation and the…
A calculational framework is proposed for phylogenetics, using nonlocal quantum field theories in hypercubic geometry. Quadratic terms in the Hamiltonian give the underlying Markov dynamics, while higher degree terms represent branching…
The process of evolutionary diversification unfolds in a vast genotypic space of potential outcomes. During the past century there have been remarkable advances in the development of theory for this diversification, and the theory's success…
It is usually believed that Darwin's theory leads to a smooth gradual evolution, so that mass extinctions must be caused by external shocks. However, it has recently been argued that mass extinctions arise from the intrinsic dynamics of…
Physicists are increasingly beginning to take seriously the possibility of laws outside the traditional time-evolution paradigm; yet our understanding of determinism is still predicated on a forwards time-evolution picture, making it…
Evolutionary game theory has traditionally assumed that all individuals in a population interact with each other between reproduction events. We show that eliminating this restriction by explicitly considering the time scales of interaction…
Instructive influence of environment on heredity has been a debated topic for centuries. Darwin's identification of natural selection coupled to chance variation as the driving force for evolution, against a formal interpretation proposed…