Related papers: An Adaptive Threshold in Mammalian Neocortical Evo…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
We formulate the search for phenomenological models of synaptic plasticity as an optimization problem. We employ Cartesian genetic programming to evolve biologically plausible human-interpretable plasticity rules that allow a given network…
Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex fire when animals that are exploring a certain region of space occupy the vertices of a triangular grid that spans the environment. Different neurons feature triangular grids that differ in their…
Accessibility percolation is a new type of percolation problem inspired by evolutionary biology. To each vertex of a graph a random number is assigned and a path through the graph is called accessible if all numbers along the path are in…
The morphological fingerprint in the brain is capable of identifying the uniqueness of an individual. However, whether such individual patterns are present in perinatal brains, and which morphological attributes or cortical regions better…
Genetic robustness, the preservation of an optimal phenotype in the face of mutations, is critical to the understanding of evolution as phenotypically expressed genetic variation is the fuel of natural selection. The origin of genetic…
The convolutional neural network (CNN) has become a basic model for solving many computer vision problems. In recent years, a new class of CNNs, recurrent convolution neural network (RCNN), inspired by abundant recurrent connections in the…
Most genes are part of larger families of evolutionary related genes. The history of gene families typically involves duplications and losses of genes as well as horizontal transfers into other organisms. The reconstruction of detailed gene…
By introducing the notions of living and dead nodes a new model of random tree evolution with continuous time parameter has been constructed. It is assumed that two random variables, the lifetime and the offspring number of living nodes…
Genetic interactions can strongly influence the fitness effects of individual mutations, yet the impact of these epistatic interactions on evolutionary dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the evolutionary role of…
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…
Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics…
Artificial and biological systems may evolve similar computational solutions despite fundamental differences in architecture and learning mechanisms -- a form of convergent evolution. We demonstrate this phenomenon through large-scale…
The adaptive evolution of a population under the influence of mutation and selection is strongly influenced by the structure of the underlying fitness landscape, which encodes the interactions between mutations at different genetic loci.…
Mounting experimental evidence suggests that brain-state-specific neural mechanisms, supported by connectomic architectures, play a crucial role in integrating past and contextual knowledge with the current, incoming flow of evidence (e.g.,…
Early brain connectivity development consists of multiple stages: birth of neurons, their migration and the subsequent growth of axons and dendrites. Each stage occurs within a certain period of time depending on types of neurons and…
The existence of complex (multiple-step) genetic adaptations that are "irreducible" (i.e., all partial combinations are less fit than the original genotype) is one of the longest standing problems in evolutionary biology. In standard…
Biological systems must be robust for stable function against perturbations, but robustness alone is not sufficient. The ability to switch between appropriate states (phenotypes) in response to different conditions is essential for…
We are interested in the evolving genealogy of a birth and death process with trait structure and ecological interactions. Traits are hereditarily transmitted from a parent to its offspring unless a mutation occurs. The dynamics may depend…
We model the evolution of eukaryotic protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. In our model, PPI networks evolve by two known biological mechanisms: (1) Gene duplication, which is followed by rapid diversification of duplicate…