Related papers: Hominid evolution: genetics versus memetics
Neural networks show a progressive increase in complexity during the time course of evolution. From diffuse nerve nets in Cnidaria to modular, hierarchical systems in macaque and humans, there is a gradual shift from simple processes…
The variant of phenomenological theory of humankind future existence after time of demographic transition based on treating the time of demographic transition as a point of phase transition and taking into account an appearing of the new…
We show that a simple nonlinear differential equation (originally studied in the physics of disordered systems) is able to mathematically describe the global population growth over the past 12000 years. Different regimes of population…
For over 165 million years, dinosaurs reigned on this planet. Their entire existence saw variations in their body size and mass . Understanding the relationship between various attributes such as femur length, breadth; humerus length,…
Human populations have experienced dramatic growth since the Neolithic revolution. Recent studies that sequenced a very large number of individuals observed an extreme excess of rare variants, and provided clear evidence of recent rapid…
As artificial intelligence systems (AIs) become increasingly produced by recursive self-improvement, a form of evolution may emerge, with the traits of AI systems shaped by the success of earlier AIs in designing and propagating their…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
This paper presents a new type of evolutionary algorithm (EA) based on the concept of "meme", where the individuals forming the population are represented by semantic networks and the fitness measure is defined as a function of the…
A natural example of evolution can be described by a time-dependent two degrees-of-freedom Hamiltonian. We choose the case where initially the Hamiltonian derives from a general cubic potential, the linearised system has frequencies 1 and…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
We create an artificial system of agents (attention-based neural networks) which selectively exchange messages with each-other in order to study the emergence of memetic evolution and how memetic evolutionary pressures interact with genetic…
An increasing number of dissident voices claim that the standard neo-Darwinian view of genes as 'leaders' and phenotypes as 'followers' during the process of adaptive evolution should be turned on its head. This idea is older than the…
Estimating the phylogeny of the genus Homo is entering a new phase of vastly improved data and methodology. There is increasing evidence of 6 to 10 competing species/lineages at any point in the last half million years, making the…
When biological populations expand into new territory, the evolutionary outcomes can be strongly influenced by genetic drift, the random fluctuations in allele frequencies. Meanwhile, spatial variability in the environment can also…
Existing theories for the evolution of aging and death treat senescence as a side-effect of strong selection for fertility. These theories are well-developed mathematically, but fit poorly with emerging experimental data. The data suggest…
We investigate further several properties of the minority game we have recently introduced. We explain the origin of the phase transition and give an analytical expression of $\sigma^2/N$ in the $N\ll2^M$ region. The ability of the players…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
We present a mathematical simplification for the evolutionary dynamics of a heritable trait within a two-sex population. This trait is assumed to control the timing of sex-specific life-history events, such as the age of sexual maturity and…
Predicting evolution of expanding populations is critical to control biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with examples of…
We study the evolution of gene frequencies in a population living in $\mathbb{R}^d$, modelled by the spatial Lambda Fleming-Viot process with natural selection (Barton, Etheridge and Veber, 2010 and Etheridge, Veber and Yu, 2014). We…