Related papers: Evolutionary Transitions and Top-Down Causation
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
We examine the evolution of expression patterns and the organization of genetic information in populations of self-replicating digital organisms. Seeding the experiments with a linearly expressed ancestor, we witness the development of…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…
The relevance of chaos to evolution is discussed in the context of the origin and maintenance of diversity and complexity. Evolution to the edge of chaos is demonstrated in an imitation game. As an origin of diversity, dynamic clustering of…
This paper proposes a variational approach to describe the evolution of organization of complex systems from first principles, as increased efficiency of physical action. Most simply stated, physical action is the product of the energy and…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
While generic competitive systems exhibit mixtures of hierarchy and cycles, real-world systems are predominantly hierarchical. We demonstrate and extend a mechanism for hierarchy; systems with similar agents approach perfect hierarchy in…
We apply the theory of learning to physically renormalizable systems in an attempt to develop a theory of biological evolution, including the origin of life, as multilevel learning. We formulate seven fundamental principles of evolution…
The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
Networks provide a powerful formalism for modeling complex systems by using a model of pairwise interactions. But much of the structure within these systems involves interactions that take place among more than two nodes at once; for…
Evolutionary models are used to study the self-organisation of collective action, often incorporating population structure due to its ubiquitous presence and long-known impact on emerging phenomena. We investigate the evolution of…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
The universal prevalence of cooperation is puzzling, as defection typically yields higher payoffs than cooperation, motivating searches for hidden pathways to cooperation. Here we study a game-theoretic model on a lattice structured…
Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…
We introduce a minimal model of multilevel selection on structured populations, considering the interplay between game theory and population dynamics. Through a bottleneck process, finite groups are formed with cooperators and defectors…
Biological systems reach hierarchical complexity that has no counterpart outside the realm of biology. Undoubtedly, biological entities obey the fundamental physical laws. Can today's physics provide an explanatory framework for…
Researchers have proposed that the distinction between so-called "simple" and "complex" societies can be expressed by an increase in the number of levels at which functional organization, interaction, and thus selection, operate. In spite…