Related papers: Does self-replication imply evolvability?
Creating autonomous, self-supporting, self-replicating, sustainable systems is a great challenge. To some extent, understanding life means not only being able to create it from scratch, but also improving, supporting, saving it, or even…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs,…
This work exposes which mechanisms and procesess in the Nature of evolution compute a function not computable by Turing machine. The computer with intelligence that is not higher than one bacteria population could have, but with efficency…
Evolvability is defined as the ability of a population to generate heritable variation to facilitate its adaptation to new environments or selection pressures. In this article, we consider evolvability as a phenotypic trait subject to…
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…
The functioning of many biochemical networks is often robust -- remarkably stable under changes in external conditions and internal reaction parameters. Much recent work on robustness and evolvability has focused on the structure of neutral…
Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously…
The origin of life can be understood mathematically to be the origin of information that can replicate. The likelihood that entropy spontaneously becomes information can be calculated from first principles, and depends exponentially on the…
Evolvability refers to the ability of an individual genotype (solution) to produce offspring with mutually diverse phenotypes. Recent research has demonstrated that divergent search methods, particularly novelty search, promote evolvability…
Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory explains how the appearance of purposive design in the sophisticated adaptations of living organisms can have come about without their intentionally being designed. The explanation relies crucially on the…
Biological evolution continuously refines the design of species, resulting in highly optimised organisms over hundreds of millennia. Intuitively, we expect that random changes-evolution's primary mechanism-are more likely to be harmful than…
Computer modelling for evolutionary systems consists in: 1) to store in the memory the individual features of each member of a large population; and 2) to update the whole system repeatedly, as time goes by, according to some prescribed…
Recent computational experiments have demonstrated the spontaneous emergence of self-replicating programs across universal automata, artificial chemistries, and self-modifying code systems. Remarkably, these results arise without explicit…
Designing evolutionary algorithms capable of uncovering highly evolvable representations is an open challenge; such evolvability is important because it accelerates evolution and enables fast adaptation to changing circumstances. This paper…
Computing systems are omnipresent; their sustainability has become crucial for our society. A key aspect of this sustainability is the ability of computing systems to cope with the continuous change they face, ranging from dynamic operating…
We dwell upon the physicist's conception of `life' since Schroedinger and Wigner through to the modern-day language of living systems in the light of quantum information. We discuss some basic features of a living system such as ordinary…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
Different subsystems of organisms adapt over many time scales, such as rapid changes in the nervous system (learning), slower morphological and neurological change over the lifetime of the organism (postnatal development), and change over…
Evolution of life on earth was governed, primarily, by natural selection, with major contribution of other evolutionary processes, such as neutral variation, exaptation, and gene duplication. However, for biological evolution to take off, a…