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Rediscovering a new function for something can be just as important as the discovery itself. In 1982, Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba named this phenomenon Exaptation to describe a radical shift in the function of a specific trait…
The phenomenon of preadaptation, or exaptation (wherein a trait that originally evolved to solve one problem is co-opted to solve a new problem) presents a formidable challenge to efforts to describe biological phenomena using a classical…
The frameworks that explore scientific and technological evolution suggest that discoveries and inventions are intrinsic processes, while the wealth of knowledge accumulated over time enables researchers to make further advancements,…
Feature interaction selection is a fundamental problem in commercial recommender systems. Most approaches equally enumerate all features and interactions by the same pre-defined operation under expert guidance. Their recommendation is…
Many species engage in acts that could be called creative. However, human creativity is unique in that it has transformed our planet. Given that the anatomy of the human brain is not so different from that of the great apes, what enables us…
Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely…
There is overwhelming evidence that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution. Investigating the consequences of self-modification, and more precisely, the consequences of utility function self-modification, leads to the…
Self-adaptation is used in all main paradigms of evolutionary computation to increase efficiency. We claim that the basis of self-adaptation is the use of neutrality. In the absence of external control neutrality allows a variation of the…
Biological intelligence is inherently adaptive -- animals continually adjust their actions based on environmental feedback. However, creating adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) remains a major challenge. The next frontier is to go beyond…
For billions of years, evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life, including humans. Evolution endowed humans with high intelligence, which allowed us to become one of the most successful species on the planet.…
In models for the evolution of predation from initially purely competitive species interactions, the propensity of predation is most often assumed to be a direct consequence of the relative morphological and physiological traits of…
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…
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…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Human culture is uniquely cumulative and open-ended. Using a computational model of cultural evolution in which neural network based agents evolve ideas for actions through invention and imitation, we tested the hypothesis that this is due…
The theory of interaction-based evolution argues that, at the most basic level of analysis, there is a third alternative for how adaptive evolution works besides a) accidental mutation and natural selection and b) Lamarckism, namely, c)…
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;…
One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…
It has been hypothesized that one of the main reasons evolution has been able to produce such impressive adaptations is because it has improved its own ability to evolve -- "the evolution of evolvability". Rupert Riedl, for example, an…
It has been suggested that innovations occur mainly by combination: the more inventions accumulate, the higher the probability that new inventions are obtained from previous designs. Additionally, it has been conjectured that the…