Related papers: Replication Ethics
The oft-repeated claim that life is written into the laws of nature are examined and criticized. Arguments are given in favour of life spreading between near-neighbour planets in rocky impact ejecta (transpermia), but against panspermia,…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
The accelerated path of technological development, particularly at the interface between hardware and biology has been suggested as evidence for future major technological breakthroughs associated to our potential to overcome biological…
Heritability is a central concept in the long-standing debate about nature versus nurture in biological and social sciences. However, existing notions of heritability are based on strong assumptions and do not use explicit causal models. We…
While data-driven predictive models are a strictly technological construct, they may operate within a social context in which benign engineering choices entail implicit, indirect and unexpected real-life consequences. Fairness of such…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
Reproducibility is a confused terminology. In this paper, I take a fundamental view on reproducibility rooted in the scientific method. The scientific method is analysed and characterised in order to develop the terminology required to…
We consider a novel setting where a set of items are matched to the same set of agents repeatedly over multiple rounds. Each agent gets exactly one item per round, which brings interesting challenges to finding efficient and/or fair {\em…
Reproducibility has been consistently identified as an important component of scientific research. Although there is a general consensus on the importance of reproducibility along with the other commonly used 'R' terminology (i.e.,…
In their recent comment, Cockell et al. argue that the habitability of an environment is fundamentally a binary property; that is to say, an environment can either support the metabolic processes of a given organism or not. The habitability…
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in repeated social interactions. According to this literature, individuals naturally learn to adopt conditionally cooperative strategies if they have multiple encounters…
Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…
The ability of a model to learn continually can be empirically assessed in different continual learning scenarios. Each scenario defines the constraints and the opportunities of the learning environment. Here, we challenge the current trend…
In recent years, a series of high-profile retractions and fraud cases have arisen in physics, sparking a conversation about research integrity and replicability. Here, we discuss how the practice of science is shaped by the social and…
The feasibility of autonomous artificial thinking systems needs to compare the way the human beings acquire their information and develops the thought with the current capacities of the autonomous information systems. Our model uses four…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
I study how past and future choices are linked in the framework of attention. Attention cannot be observed but past choices are necessarily considered in future decisions. This link connects two types of rationality violations,…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
Mixed reality (MR) ethics occupies a space that intersects with web ethics, emerging tech ethics, healthcare ethics and product ethics (among others). This paper focuses on how we can build an immersive web that encourages ethical…