Related papers: Darwinian Selection Induces Lamarckian Adaptation …
This study explores the integration of Lamarckian system into evolutionary robotics (ER), comparing it with the traditional Darwinian model across various environments. By adopting Lamarckian principles, where robots inherit learned traits,…
Lamarckian inheritance has been shown to be a powerful accelerator in systems where the joint evolution of robot morphologies and controllers is enhanced with individual learning. Its defining advantage lies in the offspring inheriting…
Instructive influence of environment on heredity has been a debated topic for centuries. Darwin's identification of natural selection coupled to chance variation as the driving force for evolution, against a formal interpretation proposed…
In recent years, studies in epigenetic inheritance in biological systems as well as studies on evolution in non-biological systems e.g., machine learning and robotics, have reopened the discussion of non-Darwinian methods of evolutionary…
Bacteria often develop distinct phenotypes to adapt to environmental stress. In particular, they can produce biofilms, dense communities of bacteria that live in a complex extracellular matrix. Bacterial biofilms provide a safe haven from…
We present a two-species population model in a well-mixed environment where the dynamics involves, in addition to birth and death, changes due to environmental factors and inter-species interactions. The novel dynamical components are…
The co-optimization of a robot's body and brain presents a coupled challenge: the morphology constrains which control strategies are effective, while the control determines how well the morphology performs. To address this, we combine…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…
We propose a hybrid dynamical system approach to model the evolution of a pathogen that experiences different selective pressures according to a stochastic process. In every environment, the evolution of the pathogen is described by a…
How adaptive evolution to one environmental stress improves or suppresses adaptation to another is an important problem in evolutionary biology. For instance, in microbiology, the evolution of bacteria to be resistant to different…
This paper introduces a stochastic adaptive dynamics model for the interplay of several crucial traits and mechanisms in bacterial evolution, namely dormancy, horizontal gene transfer (HGT), mutation and competition. In particular, it…
The Darwinian paradigm of biological evolution is based on the separability of the variation and selection processes. As a result, the population thinking had always been an integral part of the Darwinian approach. I propose an alternative…
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…
Understanding how a stressor applied on a biological system shapes its evolution is key to achieving targeted evolutionary control. Here we present a toy model of two interacting lattice proteins to quantify the response to the selective…
At what level does selective pressure effectively act? When considering the reproductive dynamics of interacting and mutating agents, it has long been debated whether selection is better understood by focusing on the individual or if…
We study the role of recombination, as practiced by genetically-competent bacteria, in speeding up Darwinian evolution. This is done by adding a new process to a previously-studied Markov model of evolution on a smooth fitness landscape;…
Biological systems like long-lived clonal organisms, holobionts and clades challenge traditional evolutionary thinking since they adapt without populations or reproduction. This paper aims to provide an overarching theoretical framework…
Evolutionary robot systems offer two principal advantages: an advanced way of developing robots through evolutionary optimization and a special research platform to conduct what-if experiments regarding questions about evolution. Our study…
Cooperation is a difficult proposition in the face of Darwinian selection. Those that defect have an evolutionary advantage over cooperators who should therefore die out. However, spatial structure enables cooperators to survive through the…
In this work, we characterize the solution of a system of elliptic integro-differential equations describing a phenotypically structured population subject to mutation, selection and migration between two habitats. Assuming that the effects…