Related papers: Evolutionary Transitions and Top-Down Causation

The evolution of structure in biology is driven by accretion and change. Accretion brings together disparate parts to form bigger wholes. Change provides opportunities for growth and innovation. Here we review patterns and processes that…

The environment has a strong influence on a population's evolutionary dynamics. Driven by both intrinsic and external factors, the environment is subject to continual change in nature. To capture an ever-changing environment, we consider a…

Anthropologists have observed gift relationships that establish social relations as well as the transference of goods in many human societies. The totality of such social relations constitutes the network. Social scientists have analysed…

A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…

Systems whose organization displays causal asymmetry constraints, from evolutionary trees to river basins or transport networks, can be often described in terms of directed paths (causal flows) on a discrete state space. Such a set of paths…

Evolutionary optimization algorithms are often derived from loose biological analogies and struggle to leverage information obtained during the sequential course of optimization. An alternative promising approach is to leverage data and…

Open-ended evolution requires unbounded possibilities that evolving entities can explore. The cardinality of a set of those possibilities thus has a significant implication for the open-endedness of evolution. We propose that facilitating…

We show that evolution in a population of adaptive agents, repeatedly competing for a limited resource, can come to an abrupt halt. This transition from evolutionary to non-evolutionary behavior arises as the global resource level is…

Population structure induced by both spatial embedding and more general networks of interaction, such as model social networks, have been shown to have a fundamental effect on the dynamics and outcome of evolutionary games. These effects…

Higher-order interactions are prevalent in real-world complex systems and exert unique influences on system evolution that cannot be captured by pairwise interactions. We incorporate game transitions into the higher-order prisoner's dilemma…

We study the multi-scale description of large-time collective behavior of agents driven by alignment. The resulting multi-flock dynamics arises naturally with realistic initial configurations consisting of multiple spatial scaling, which in…

We provide a novel approach and an exploratory study for modelling life event choices and occurrence from a probabilistic perspective through causal discovery and survival analysis. Our approach is formulated as a bi-level problem. In the…

The purpose of this roadmap article is to draw attention to a paradigm shift in our understanding of evolution towards a perspective of ecological-evolutionary feedback, highlighted through two recent highly simplified examples of rapid…

Cooperation is fundamental to human societies, and the interaction structure among individuals profoundly shapes its emergence and evolution. In real-world scenarios, cooperation prevails in multi-group (higher-order) populations, beyond…

Evolutionary transitions occur when previously-independent replicating entities unite to form more complex individuals. Such transitions have profoundly shaped natural evolutionary history and occur in two forms: fraternal transitions…

A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…

In a range of scientific coauthorship networks, transitions emerge in degree distributions, correlations between degrees and local clustering coefficients, etc. The existence of those transitions could be regarded as a result of the…

The origin of life must have been preceded by Darwin-like evolutionary dynamics that could propagate it. How did that adaptive dynamics arise? And from what prebiotic molecules? Using evolutionary invasion analysis, we develop a universal…

The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…

Macroevolutionary dynamics often display sudden, explosive surges, where systems remain relatively stable for extended periods before experiencing dramatic acceleration that frequently exceeds traditional exponential growth. This pattern is…