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Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design,…
Neuroscientists have long criticised deep learning algorithms as incompatible with current knowledge of neurobiology. We explore more biologically plausible versions of deep representation learning, focusing here mostly on unsupervised…
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;…
A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by…
Generative modeling builds on and substantially advances the classical idea of simulating synthetic data from observed samples. This paper shows that this principle is not only natural but also theoretically well-founded for bootstrap…
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…
Human beings prefer ordered complexity and not randomness in their environment, a result of our perceptual system evolving to interpret natural forms. We also recognize monotonously repeating forms as unnatural. Although widespread in…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
Neural theories of consciousness face three difficulties: (1) The selection problem: how are those neurons which cause consciousness selected, from all the other neurons which do not? (2) the precision problem: how do neurons hold a…
A novel mechanism for sympatric speciation that takes into account complex bio-processes within each individual organism is proposed. According to dynamical systems theory, organisms with identical genotypes can possess differentiated…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
Biological data in digital form has become a, if not the, driving force behind innovations in biology, medicine, and the environment. No study and no model would be complete without access to digital data (including text) collected by…
Why is the genetic code the way it is? The most successful theory states that the codon assignments minimise the effects of errors arising in primordial living systems. Here a transversion is reported that leaves invariant degeneracy in the…
This article explains how natural selection works and how it has been inappropriately applied to the description of cultural change. It proposes an alternative evolutionary explanation for cultural evolution that describes it in terms of…
Learning, especially rapid learning, is critical for survival. However, learning is hard: a large number of synaptic weights must be set based on noisy, often ambiguous, sensory information. In such a high-noise regime, keeping track of…
It is usually believed that Darwin's theory leads to a smooth gradual evolution, so that mass extinctions must be caused by external shocks. However, it has recently been argued that mass extinctions arise from the intrinsic dynamics of…
The scheme of a unified Darwinian evolutionary theory for physical and biological systems is described. Every physical system is methodologically endowed with a classical information processor what turns every system into an agent being…
Well known biological approximations are universal, i.e. invariant to transformations from one species to another. With no other experimental data, such invariance yields exact conservation (with respect to biological diversity and…
Symmetry is a fundamental concept in modern physics and other related sciences. Being such a powerful tool, almost all physical theories can be derived from symmetry, and the effectiveness of such an approach is astonishing. Since many…
Quantum Darwinism explains the emergence of a classical description of objects in terms of the creation of many redundant registers in an environment containing their classical information. This amplification phenomenon, where only…