Related papers: Evolution leads to a diversity of motion-detection…
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…
The quest to comprehend the origins of intelligence raises intriguing questions about the evolution of learning abilities in natural systems. Why do living organisms possess an inherent drive to acquire knowledge of the unknown? Is this…
Emergence is a phenomenon taken for granted in science but also still not well understood. We have developed a model of artificial genetic evolution intended to allow for emergence on genetic, population and social levels. We present the…
The origin of cellular life can be described in terms of the transition from inorganic matter: solids, liquids and gases, to the emergence of cooperative assemblies of organic matter, DNA and proteins,capable of replication and metabolism.…
Many complex adaptive systems contain a large diversity of specialized components. The specialization at the level of the microscopic degrees of freedom, and diversity at the level of the system as a whole are phenomena that appear during…
The structure and performance of neural networks are intimately connected, and by use of evolutionary algorithms, neural network structures optimally adapted to a given task can be explored. Guiding such neuroevolution with additional…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
Different evolutionary models are known to make disparate predictions for the success of an invading mutant in some situations. For example, some evolutionary mechanics lead to amplification of selection in structured populations, while…
The problem of the directionality of genome evolution is studied. Based on the analysis of C-value paradox and the evolution of genome size we propose that the function-coding information quantity of a genome always grows in the course of…
A computational revolution unleashed the power of artificial neural networks. At the heart of that revolution is automatic differentiation, which calculates the derivative of a performance measure relative to a large number of parameters.…
We show how the characteristics of the evolutionary algorithm influence the evolvability of candidate solutions, i.e. the propensity of evolving individuals to generate better solutions as a result of genetic variation. More specifically,…
The puzzle of computer vision might find new challenging solutions when we realize that most successful methods are working at image level, which is remarkably more difficult than processing directly visual streams. In this paper, we claim…
This paper considers neural representation through the lens of active inference, a normative framework for understanding brain function. It delves into how living organisms employ generative models to minimize the discrepancy between…
A fascinating aspect of nature lies in its ability to produce a collection of organisms that are all high-performing in their niche. Quality-Diversity (QD) methods are evolutionary algorithms inspired by this observation, that obtained…
We study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…
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.…
We investigate the evolutionary processes behind the development and optimization of multiple threads of execution in digital organisms using the avida platform, a software package that implements Darwinian evolution on populations of…
The origin and organizing principles of the genetic code remain fundamental puzzles in life science. The vanishingly low probability of the natural codon-to-amino acid mapping arising by chance has spurred the hypothesis that its structure…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…