Related papers: The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Facilitates Ev…
Evolution Strategies (ES) emerged as a scalable alternative to popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques, providing an almost perfect speedup when distributed across hundreds of CPU cores thanks to a reduced communication overhead.…
Evolution depends on the fitness of organisms, the expected rate of reproducing. Directly getting offspring is the most basic form of fitness, but fitness can also be increased indirectly by helping genetically related individuals (such as…
Formal modelling provides a toolkit for understanding cultural dynamics, from individual decisions to recurring patterns of change. This chapter explains what models are and why they matter. Using a precise, shared language, they aid…
The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology is rapidly accelerating the pace of biological discovery and engineering. AI techniques, such as large language models and biological design tools, are enabling the…
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 by Natural Selection is a process by which progeny inherit some properties from their progenitors with small variation. These properties are subject to Natural Selection and are called adaptive traits and carriers of the latter…
Cultural evolution allows ideas and technologies to accumulate across generations, reaching their most complex and open-ended form in humans. While social learning enables the transmission of such innovations, the cognitive processes that…
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…
Many problems in evolutionary theory are cast in dyadic terms, such as the polar oppositions of organism and environment. We argue that a triadic conceptual structure offers an alternative perspective under which the information generating…
The speed and transformative power of human cultural evolution is evident from the change it has wrought on our planet. This chapter proposes a human computation program aimed at (1) distinguishing algorithmic from non-algorithmic…
Artificial intelligence methods are being increasingly applied across various domains, but their often opaque nature has raised concerns about accountability and trust. In response, the field of explainable AI (XAI) has emerged to address…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
The amount of sequence data obtained from ancient samples has dramatically expanded in the last decade, and so have the types of questions that can now be addressed using ancient DNA. In the field of human history, while ancient DNA has…
A common assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing evolution of complexity appear more nuanced. Evolution is deeply connected to learning, where…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
NeuroEvolution (NE) methods are known for applying Evolutionary Computation to the optimisation of Artificial Neural Networks(ANNs). Despite aiding non-expert users to design and train ANNs, the vast majority of NE approaches disregard the…
Intelligent machines with superhuman capabilities have the potential to uncover problem-solving strategies beyond human discovery. Emerging evidence from competitive gameplay, such as Go and chess, demonstrates that AI systems are evolving…
Classic economic science is reaching the limits of its explanatory powers. Complexity science uses an increasingly larger set of different methods to analyze physical, biological, cultural, social, and economic factors, providing a broader…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
Biological evolution continuously refines the design of species, resulting in highly optimised organisms over hundreds of millennia. Intuitively, we expect that random changes-evolution's primary mechanism-are more likely to be harmful than…