Related papers: The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Facilitates Ev…
Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. To gain a fundamental understanding of resistance evolution, a combination of systematic experimental and theoretical approaches is required. Evolution experiments combined with…
Our planet is experiencing an accelerated process of change associated to a variety of anthropogenic phenomena. The future of this transformation is uncertain, but there is general agreement about its negative unfolding that might threaten…
Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…
Scientific progress has long been understood as recombinant, with breakthroughs arising when existing ideas are joined in new ways. Empirical work in this tradition has focused on the inputs to discovery, asking whether a paper draws…
Evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is an important solution concept in game theory which has been applied frequently to biological models. Informally an ESS is a strategy that if followed by the population cannot be taken over by a…
Social dilemmas are an integral part of social interactions. Cooperative actions, ranging from secreting extra-cellular products in microbial populations to donating blood in humans, are costly to the actor and hence create an incentive to…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…
This work aims to present our current best physical understanding of common-envelope evolution (CEE). We highlight areas of consensus and disagreement, and stress ideas which should point the way forward for progress in this important but…
A large number of engineering, science and computational problems have yet to be solved in a computationally efficient way. One of the emerging challenges is how evolving technologies grow towards autonomy and intelligent decision making.…
Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for…
Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. Human history can be regarded as a sequence of long periods of cultural stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts that transform culture upside-down over the turn of a few…
The evolution processes of complex systems carry key information in the systems' functional properties. Applying machine learning algorithms, we demonstrate that the historical formation process of various networked complex systems can be…
Emerging empirical and theoretical thinking about human aging places considerable value upon the role of the environment as a major factor which can promote prolonged healthy longevity. Our contemporary, information-rich environment is…
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…
Evolutionary games are a developing sub-field of game theory. This branch of game theory is used in the study of the adaptation of large, but finite, populations of agents to changes in the environment. It assumes that each agent has no…
Natural selection successfully explains how organisms accumulate adaptive change despite that traits acquired over a lifetime are eliminated at the end of each generation. However, in some domains that exhibit cumulative, adaptive change --…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
Many evolutionary algorithms (EAs) take advantage of parallel evaluation of candidates. However, if evaluation times vary significantly, many worker nodes (i.e.,\ compute clients) are idle much of the time, waiting for the next generation…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
Synthetic biology is an emerging field that involves the engineering and re-design of organisms for purposes such as food security, health, and environmental protection. As such, it poses numerous ethical, legal, and social implications…