Related papers: Passive and Driven Trends in the Evolution of Comp…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
In order to make a case for or against a trend in the evolution of complexity in biological evolution, complexity needs to be both rigorously defined and measurable. A recent information-theoretic (but intuitively evident) definition…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
Evolutionary complexity is here measured by the number of trials/evaluations needed for evolving a logical gate in a non-linear medium. Behavioural complexity of the gates evolved is characterised in terms of cellular automata behaviour. We…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology and Artificial Life (Bonner, 1988; Bedau et al., 2000). Complexification has been interpreted in different ways: as a process of diversification between evolving units…
What features characterise complex system dynamics? Power laws and scale invariance of fluctuations are often taken as the hallmarks of complexity, drawing on analogies with equilibrium critical phenomena[1-3]. Here we argue that slow,…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
Why are living systems complex? Why does the biosphere contain living beings with complexity features beyond those of the simplest replicators? What kind of evolutionary pressures result in more complex life forms? These are key questions…
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…
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?…
To analyze the evolutionary emergence of structural complexity in physical processes we introduce a general, but tractable, model of objects that interact to produce new objects. Since the objects--\emph{$epsilon$-machines}--have well…
Of all the issues discussed at {\em Alife VII: Looking Forward, Looking Backward}, the issue of whether it was possible to create an artificial life system that exhibits {\em open-ended evolution} of novelty is by far the biggest. Of the 14…
In this paper we examine the concept of complexity as it applies to generative and evolutionary art and design. Complexity has many different, discipline specific definitions, such as complexity in physical systems (entropy), algorithmic…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
A central goal of evolutionary biology is to explain the origins and distribution of diversity across life. Beyond species or genetic diversity, we also observe diversity in the circuits (genetic or otherwise) underlying complex functional…
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…
We simulate an individual-based model that represents both the phenotype and genome of digital organisms with predator-prey interactions. We show how open-ended growth of complexity arises from the invariance of genetic evolution operators…
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…
In this paper we propose an approach for measuring growth of complexity of emerging patterns in complex systems such as cellular automata. We discuss several ways how a metric for measuring the complexity growth can be defined. This…
Over the past 30 years many researchers in the field of evolutionary computation have put a lot of effort to introduce various approaches for solving hard problems. Most of these problems have been inspired by major industries so that…