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Living things, computers, societies, and even books are part of a grand evolutionary struggle to survive. That struggle shapes nature, nations, religions, art, science, and you. What you think, feel, and do is determined by it. Darwinian…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…
In apparent contradiction to competition theory, the number of known, co-existing plankton species far exceeds their explicable biodiversity - a discrepancy termed the Paradox of the Plankton. We introduce a new game-theoretic model for…
Creative processes are typically divided into three types: combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational. Here, we provide a graphical theory of transformational scientific creativity, synthesizing Boden's insight that transformational…
Artificial intelligence has made great strides since the deep learning revolution, but AI systems still struggle to extrapolate outside of their training data and adapt to new situations. For inspiration we look to the domain of science,…
Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them…
There are many philosophies and theories on what creativity is and how it works, but one popular idea is that of variations on a theme and intersection of concepts. This literature review explores philosophical proposals of how creativity…
An inductive learning algorithm takes a set of data as input and generates a hypothesis as output. A set of data is typically consistent with an infinite number of hypotheses; therefore, there must be factors other than the data that…
The Boltzmann model for the random generation of "decomposable" combinatorial structures is a set of techniques that allows for efficient random sampling algorithms for a large class of families of discrete objects. The usual requirement of…
Can scientific discovery be made arbitrarily easy by choosing the right representation, collecting enough data, and deploying sufficiently powerful algorithms? This paper argues that the answer is fundamentally negative. We introduce the…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
Hubbell's neutral theory of biodiversity has successfully explained the observed composition of many ecological communities but it relies on strict demographic equivalence among species and provides no room for evolutionary processes like…
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down". Can Darwinian random mutations and selection…
Even though the brain operates in pure darkness, within the skull, it can infer the most likely causes of its sensory input. An approach to modelling this inference is to assume that the brain has a generative model of the world, which it…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
The idea that a genetically fixed behavior evolved from the once differential learning ability of individuals that performed the behavior is known as the Baldwin effect. A highly influential paper [Hinton G.E., Nowlan S.J., 1987. How…
Evaluating theories in physics used to be easy. Our theories provided very distinct predictions. Experimental accuracy was so small that worrying about epistemological problems was not necessary. That is no longer the case. The…
The current theory of evolution is almost the one Darwin and Wallace proposed two centuries ago and the following discoveries e.g., Mendelian genetics and neutral mutation theory have not made significant modifications. The current…
Genetic drift is stochastic fluctuations of alleles frequencies in a population due to sampling effects. We consider a model of drift in an equilibrium population, with high mutation rates: few functional mutations per generation. Such…