Related papers: Ignorance can be evolutionarily beneficial

The paper discusses a connection between asymmetric reproduction -- that is reproduction in a parent-child relationship where the parent does not mutate during reproduction --, the fact that all non-viral lifeforms bear genes of their…

This essay looks at decision-making with interval-valued probability measures. Existing decision methods have either supplemented expected utility methods with additional criteria of optimality, or have attempted to supplement the…

We study the theoretical consequence of p-hacking on the accumulation of knowledge under the framework of mis-specified Bayesian learning. A sequence of researchers, in turn, choose projects that generate noisy information in a field. In…

In many biological networks the responses of individual elements are ambiguous. We consider a scenario in which many sensors respond to a shared signal, each with limited information capacity, and ask that the outputs together convey as…

Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…

A natural way of quantifying the ``amount of information'' in decision problems yields a globally concave value for information. Another (in contrast, adversarial) way almost never does.

Organisms have evolved immune systems that can counter pathogenic threats. The adaptive immune system in vertebrates consists of a diverse repertoire of immune receptors that can dynamically reorganize to specifically target the…

This study extends Blackwell's (1953) comparison of information to a sequential social learning model, where agents make decisions sequentially based on both private signals and the observed actions of others. In this context, we introduce…

The adaptation process of a species to a new environment is a significant area of study in biology. As part of natural selection, adaptation is a mutation process which improves survival skills and reproductive functions of species. Here,…

Prediction becomes more challenging with missing covariates. What method is chosen to handle missingness can greatly affect how models perform. In many real-world problems, the best prediction performance is achieved by models that can…

We study a sequential social learning model in which there is uncertainty about the informativeness of a common signal-generating process. Rational agents arrive in order and make decisions based on the past actions of others and their…

Is reduction always a good scientific strategy? Does it always lead to a gain in information? The very existence of the special sciences above and beyond physics seems to hint no. Previous research has shown that dimension reduction…

Machine intelligence can develop either directly from experience or by inheriting experience through evolution. The bulk of current research efforts focus on algorithms which learn directly from experience. I argue that the alternative,…

Here we focus on the description of the mechanisms behind the process of information aggregation and decision making, a basic step to understand emergent phenomena in society, such as trends, information spreading or the wisdom of crowds.…

The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…

Biosemiosis is a process of choice-making between simultaneously alternative options. It is well-known that, when sufficiently young children encounter a new word, they tend to interpret it as pointing to a meaning that does not have a word…

We study belief revision when information is represented by a set of probability distributions, or general information. General information extends the standard event notion while including qualitative information (A is more likely than B),…

Microbial dormancy is an evolutionary trait that has emerged independently at various positions across the tree of life. It describes the ability of a microorganism to switch to a metabolically inactive state that can withstand unfavorable…

A major obstacle in analyzing the evolution of information exchange and processing is our insufficient understanding of the underlying signaling and decision-making biological mechanisms. For instance, it is unclear why are humans unique in…

Evolution gave rise to human and animal intelligence here on Earth. We argue that the path to developing artificial human-like-intelligence will pass through mimicking the evolutionary process in a nature-like simulation. In Nature, there…