Related papers: Does self-replication imply evolvability?
As software has become an integral part of scientific workflows, reproducible research practices must take it into account. In what way? Archiving source code is a necessary but insufficient condition. The ability to redeploy software…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Development combines three basic processes asymmetric --- cell division, signaling and gene regulation --- in a multitude of ways to create an overwhelming diversity of multicellular life-forms. Here, we attempt to chart this diversity…
Emergence is a pregnant property in various fields. It is the fact for a phenomenon to appear surprisingly and to be such that it seems at first sight that it is not possible to predict its apparition. That is the reason why it has often…
Based on the oligomer-world hypothesis we propose an abstract model where the molecular recognition among oligomers is described in the shape space. The origin of life in the oligomer world is regarded as the establishment of a metabolic…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
How many times have you tried to re-implement a past CAV tool paper, and failed? Reliably reproducing published scientific discoveries has been acknowledged as a barrier to scientific progress for some time but there remains only a small…
Reproducibility is an important requirement in evolutionary computation, where results largely depend on computational experiments. In practice, reproducibility relies on how algorithms, experimental protocols, and artifacts are documented…
Of all the issues discussed at {\em Alife VII: Looking Forward, Looking Backward}, the issue of whether it was possible to create an artificial life system that exhibits {\em open-ended evolution} of novelty is by far the biggest. Of the 14…
It is sometimes assumed that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. Here we critically examine the assumptions inherent in this if-life-evolved-rapidly-life-must-be-common argument. We use the…
Vision systems in nature show remarkable diversity, from simple light-sensitive patches to complex camera eyes with lenses. While natural selection has produced these eyes through countless mutations over millions of years, they represent…
Reproducibility is one of the core dimensions that concur to deliver Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. Broadly speaking, reproducibility can be defined as the possibility to reproduce the same or a similar experiment or method, thereby…
Although reproducibility is a core tenet of the scientific method, it remains challenging to reproduce many results. Surprisingly, this also holds true for computational results in domains such as systems biology where there have been…
Reputed intractable, the question of the origin of viruses has long been neglected. In the modern literature 'Virus evolution' has come to refer to study more akin to population genetics, such as the world-wide scrutiny on new polymorphisms…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…
The year of 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of evoloops, an evolutionary variant of Chris Langton's self-reproducing loops which proved constructively that Darwinian evolution of self-reproducing organisms by variation…
Evolutionary accumulation models (EvAMs) are an emerging class of machine learning methods designed to infer the evolutionary pathways by which features are acquired. Applications include cancer evolution (accumulation of mutations),…
This paper uses the recent idea that the fundamental haploid-diploid lifecycle of eukaryotic organisms implements a rudimentary form of learning within evolution. A general approach for evolutionary computation is here derived that differs…
How long a technological civilization remains active, and what determines whether it collapses or persists, is a central question for both projecting humanity's future and assessing the prevalence of detectable intelligence in the galaxy.…
Replication of scientific experiments is critical to the advance of science. Unfortunately, the discipline of Computer Science has never treated replication seriously, even though computers are very good at doing the same thing over and…