Related papers: Is information a selectable trait?
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…
The rate at which nodes in a network increase their connectivity depends on their fitness to compete for links. For example, in social networks some individuals acquire more social links than others, or on the www some webpages attract…
The problem of natural selection in dispersal-structured populations consisting of individuals characterized by different diffusion coefficients is studied. The competition between the organisms is taken into account through the assumption…
Nature (one's genes) and nurture (one's environment) jointly contribute to the formation and evolution of health and human capital over the life cycle. This complex interplay between genes and environment can be estimated and quantified…
With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
I consider the many ways in which evolved information-flows are restricted and metabolic resources protected and hidden -- the thesis of living phenomena as evolutionary cryptosystems. I present the information theory of secrecy systems and…
Organisms have evolved immune systems that can counter pathogenic threats. The adaptive immune system in vertebrates consists of a diverse repertoire of immune receptors that can dynamically reorganize to specifically target the…
Death has long been overlooked in evolutionary algorithms. Recent research has shown that death (when applied properly) can benefit the overall fitness of a population and can outperform sub-sections of a population that are "immortal" when…
We introduce a new model of evolution on a fitness landscape possessing a tunable degree of neutrality. The model allows us to study the general properties of molecular species undergoing neutral evolution. We find that a number of…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is…
Genetically identical cells in the same population can take on phenotypically variable states, leading to differentiated responses to external signals, such as nutrients and drug-induced stress. Many models and experiments have focused on a…
Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
How fast does a population evolve from one fitness peak to another? We study the dynamics of evolving, asexually reproducing populations in which a certain number of mutations jointly confer a fitness advantage. We consider the time until a…
Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…
Shannon's information entropy measures of the uncertainty of an event's outcome. If learning about a system reflects a decrease in uncertainty, then a plausible intuition is that learning should be accompanied by a decrease in the entropy…
The notion of information pervades informal descriptions of biological systems, but formal treatments face the problem of defining a quantitative measure of information rooted in a concept of fitness, which is itself an elusive notion.…
Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…
In mathematics information is a number that measures uncertainty (entropy) based on a probabilistic distribution, often of an obscure origin. In real life language information is a datum, a statement, more precisely, a formula. But such a…