Related papers: Is information a selectable trait?
In biology, information flows from the environment to the genome by the process of natural selection. But it has not been clear precisely what sort of information metric properly describes natural selection. Here, I show that Fisher…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
Natural selection imply that any organisms including human being will evolve to improve its fitness advantage and the selected genotype or phenotype in equilibrium state will not vary over the time. However, evolutionary process of…
We study what changes to an agent's decision problem increase her value for information. We prove that information becomes more valuable if and only if the agent's reduced-form payoff in her belief becomes more convex. When the…
Natural selection and random drift are competing phenomena for explaining the evolution of populations. Combining a highly fit mutant with a population structure that improves the odds that the mutant spreads through the whole population…
As artificial intelligence systems (AIs) become increasingly produced by recursive self-improvement, a form of evolution may emerge, with the traits of AI systems shaped by the success of earlier AIs in designing and propagating their…
Selection shapes all kinds of behaviors, including how we make decisions under uncertainty. The risk attitude reflected from it should be simple, flexible, yet consistent. In this paper we engaged evolutionary dynamics to find the decision…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
The process of evolution by natural selection leads to phenotypes of increasing fitness. For cellular chemical reaction networks, this means optimising a variety of fitness functions such as robustness, precision, or sensitivity to external…
The mutual relationship between evolution and learning is a controversial argument among the artificial intelligence and neuro-evolution communities. After more than three decades, there is still no common agreement on the matter. In this…
Many social, technological and biological interactions involve network relationships whose outcome intimately depends on the structure of the network and on the strengths of the connections. Yet, although much information is now available…
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,…
Life on earth is distinguished by long-lived correlations in time. The patterns of material organization that characterize living organisms today are contingent on events that occurred billions of years ago. This contingency is a necessary…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
We describe the evolution of macromolecules as an information transmission process and apply tools from Shannon information theory to it. This allows us to isolate three independent, competing selective pressures that we term compression,…
This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, we develop a new information theory, in which it is not a coincidence that information and physical entropy share the same mathematical formula. It is an adaptation of mind to help search…
We use sequential large-scale crawl data to empirically investigate and validate the dynamics that underlie the evolution of the structure of the web. We find that the overall structure of the web is defined by an intricate interplay…
Aging is thought to be a consequence of intrinsic breakdowns in how genetic information is processed. But mounting experimental evidence suggests that aging can be slowed. To help resolve this mystery, I derive a mortality equation which…
We present a stylized model with feedback loops for the evolution of a population's wealth over generations. Individuals have both talent and wealth: talent is a random variable distributed identically for everyone, but wealth is a random…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…