Related papers: Evolution and Probability
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…
The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…
We explore the evolution of cooperation in the framework of the evolutionary game theory using the prisoner's dilemma as metaphor of the problem. We present a minimal model taking into account the growing process of the systems and…
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.…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
We propose, in this article, an analysis of the Darwin's approach to sociality. Sociality is perfectly integrated into the selective model, and is caused by the same process as struggle for existence. Thus, the selective process does not…
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…
In this paper, we show that different types of evolutionary game dynamics are, in principle, special cases of a dynamical system model based on our previously reported framework of generalized growth transforms. The framework shows that…
We discuss the Carter's formula about the mankind evolution probability following the derivation proposed by Barrow and Tipler. We stress the relation between the existence of billions of galaxies and the evolution of at least one…
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…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Darwinism conceives evolution as a consequence of random variation and natural selection, hence it is based on a materialistic, i.e. matter-based, view of science inspired by classical physics. But matter in itself is considered a very…
This chapter discusses the possibility of instilling a virtual world with mechanisms for evolution and natural selection in order to generate rich ecosystems of complex organisms in a process akin to biological evolution. Some previous work…
Theoretical physicists have been fascinated by the phenomena of life for more than a century. As we engage with more realistic descriptions of living systems, however, things get complicated. After reviewing different reactions to this…
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,…