Related papers: Evolvability tradeoffs in emergent digital replica…
The most prominent property of life on Earth is its ability to evolve. It is often taken for granted that self-replication--the characteristic that makes life possible--implies evolvability, but many examples such as the lack of…
While all organisms on Earth descend from a common ancestor, there is no consensus on whether the origin of this ancestral self-replicator was a one-off event or whether it was only the final survivor of multiple origins. Here we use the…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
Artificial Life provides the opportunity to study the emergence and evolution of simple ecosystems in real time. We give an overview of the advantages and limitations of such an approach, as well as its relation to individual-based modeling…
Understanding how systems can be designed to be evolvable is fundamental to research in optimization, evolution, and complex systems science. Many researchers have thus recognized the importance of evolvability, i.e. the ability to find new…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
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,…
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…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
Evolvability is the capacity to evolve. This paper introduces a simple computational model of evolvability and demonstrates that, under certain conditions, evolvability can increase indefinitely, even when there is no direct selection for…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
Natural evolution has produced a tremendous diversity of functional organisms. Many believe an essential component of this process was the evolution of evolvability, whereby evolution speeds up its ability to innovate by generating a more…
One of the most important lessons from the success of deep learning is that learned representations tend to perform much better at any task compared to representations we design by hand. Yet evolution of evolvability algorithms, which aim…
Control of the living cell functions with remarkable reliability despite the stochastic nature of the underlying molecular networks -- a property presumably optimized by biological evolution. We here ask to what extent the property of a…
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…
The theory of evolvability, introduced by Valiant (2009), formalizes evolution as a constrained learning algorithm operating without labeled examples or structural knowledge. While theoretical work has established the evolvability of…
Experimental studies are prevalent in Evolutionary Computation (EC), and concerns about the reproducibility and replicability of such studies have increased in recent times, reflecting similar concerns in other scientific fields. In this…
Why evolvability appears to have increased over evolutionary time is an important unresolved biological question. Unlike most candidate explanations, this paper proposes that increasing evolvability can result without any pressure to adapt.…
Research investigating the origins of life usually focuses on exploring possible life-bearing chemistries in the pre-biotic Earth, or else on synthetic approaches. Little work has been done exploring fundamental issues concerning the…