Related papers: Does self-replication imply evolvability?
Self-replication is central to all life, and yet how it dynamically emerges in physical, non-equilibrium systems remains poorly understood. Von Neumann's pioneering work in the 1940s and subsequent developments suggest a natural hypothesis:…
Organisms result from adaptive processes interacting across different time scales. One such interaction is that between development and evolution. Models have shown that development sweeps over several traits in a single agent, sometimes…
A central goal of evolutionary biology is to explain the origins and distribution of diversity across life. Beyond species or genetic diversity, we also observe diversity in the circuits (genetic or otherwise) underlying complex functional…
An explanatory model for the emergence of evolvable units must display emerging structures that (1) preserve themselves in time (2) self-reproduce and (3) tolerate a certain amount of variation when reproducing. To tackle this challenge,…
Evolutionary robotics is a promising approach to autonomously synthesize machines with abilities that resemble those of animals, but the field suffers from a lack of strong foundations. In particular, evolutionary systems are currently…
The quest to comprehend the origins of intelligence raises intriguing questions about the evolution of learning abilities in natural systems. Why do living organisms possess an inherent drive to acquire knowledge of the unknown? Is this…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
A self-replicator is usually understood to be an object of definite form that promotes the conversion of materials in its environment into a nearly identical copy of itself. The challenge of engineering novel, micro- or nano-scale…
The process of evolutionary diversification unfolds in a vast genotypic space of potential outcomes. During the past century there have been remarkable advances in the development of theory for this diversification, and the theory's success…
Reproducibility, the ability to recompute results, and replicability, the chances other experimenters will achieve a consistent result, are two foundational characteristics of successful scientific research. Consistent findings from…
We suggest to simulate evolution of complex organisms constrained by the sole requirement of robustness in their expression patterns. This scenario is illustrated by evolving discrete logical networks with epigenetic properties. Evidence…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Neutral landscapes and mutational robustness are believed to be important enablers of evolvability in biology. We apply these concepts to software, defining mutational robustness to be the fraction of random mutations that leave a program's…
Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A key question for the origin of life, is then how can…
In a seminal paper, Valiant (2006) introduced a computational model for evolution to address the question of complexity that can arise through Darwinian mechanisms. Valiant views evolution as a restricted form of computational learning,…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
Spontaneous self-replication in cellular automata has long been considered rare, with most known examples requiring careful design or artificial initialization. In this paper, we present formal, causal evidence that such replication can…
A self-replicating system where the elements belonging to a solution category can replicate themselves by copying their own informations, is considered. The information carried by each element is defined by an element of all the n multiple…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
We propose that genetic encoding of self-assembling components greatly enhances the evolution of complex systems and provides an efficient platform for inductive generalization, i.e. the inductive derivation of a solution to a problem with…