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Visual translation tolerance refers to our capacity to recognize objects over a wide range of different retinal locations. Although translation is perhaps the simplest spatial transform that the visual system needs to cope with, the extent…
We introduce a model of molecular evolution in which the fitness of an individual depends both on its own and on the parent's genotype. The model can be solved by means of a nonlinear mapping onto the standard quasispecies model. The…
Rectilinear crawling locomotion is a primitive and common mode of locomotion in slender, soft-bodied animals. It requires coordinated contractions that propagate along a body that interacts frictionally with its environment. We propose a…
Regulatory networks consist of interacting molecules with a high degree of mutual chemical specificity. How can these molecules evolve when their function depends on maintenance of interactions with cognate partners and simultaneous…
Correlated electrical activity in neurons is a prominent characteristic of cortical microcircuits. Despite a growing amount of evidence concerning both spike-count and subthreshold membrane potential pairwise correlations, little is known…
The discovery of Paranthropus deyiremeda in 3.3-3.5 million year old fossil sites in Afar, together with 30% of the gorilla genome showing lineage sorting between humans and chimpanzees, and a NUMT ("nuclear mitochondrial DNA segment") on…
Phenotype of biological systems needs to be robust against mutation in order to sustain themselves between generations. On the other hand, phenotype of an individual also needs to be robust against fluctuations of both internal and external…
This paper reports on patterns exhibiting self-replication with spontaneous, inheritable mutations and exponential genetic drift in Neural Cellular Automata. Despite the models not being explicitly trained for mutation or inheritability,…
We propose a variation of the GMS model of evolution of species. In this version, as in the GMS model, at each birth, the new species in the system is labeled with a random fitness mark, but in our variation, to each extinction event is…
The two most fundamental processes describing change in biology, development and evolu-tion, occur over drastically different timescales, difficult to reconcile within a unified framework. Development involves temporal sequences of cell…
Recently, neuronal avalanches have been observed to display oscillations, a phenomenon regarded as the co-existence of a scale-free behaviour (the avalanches close to criticality) and scale-dependent dynamics (the oscillations). Ordinary…
Chronic viral infections can persist in an infected person for decades. From the perspective of the virus, a single infection can span thousands of generations, leading to a highly diverse population of viruses with its own complex…
Evolution of genetic code is studied as the change in the choice of enzymes that are used to synthesize amino acids from the genetic information of nucleic acids. We propose the following theory: the differentiation of physiological states…
Brain networks exhibit remarkable structural properties, including high local clustering, short path lengths, and heavy-tailed weight and degree distributions. While these features are thought to enable efficient information processing with…
Progress has led to a detailed understanding of the neural mechanisms that underlie decision making in primates. However, less is known about why such mechanisms are present in the first place. Theory suggests that primate decision making…
Disentangling the mechanisms underlying the social network evolution is one of social science's unsolved puzzles. Preferential attachment is a powerful mechanism explaining social network dynamics, yet not able to explain all scaling-laws…
When a biological population expands into new territory, genetic drift develops an enormous influence on evolution at the propagating front. In such range expansion processes, fluctuations in allele frequencies occur through stochastic…
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 ability to continuously and efficiently transfer skills across tasks is a hallmark of biological intelligence and a long-standing goal in artificial systems. Reinforcement learning (RL), a dominant paradigm for learning in…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…