Related papers: Natural reward as the fundamental macroevolutionar…
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…
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…
Resources are often limited, therefore it is essential how convincingly competitors present their claims for them. Beside a player's natural capacity, here overconfidence and bluffing may also play a decisive role and influence how to share…
It has been hypothesized that one of the main reasons evolution has been able to produce such impressive adaptations is because it has improved its own ability to evolve -- "the evolution of evolvability". Rupert Riedl, for example, an…
Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory explains how the appearance of purposive design in the sophisticated adaptations of living organisms can have come about without their intentionally being designed. The explanation relies crucially on the…
Competition for available resources is natural amongst coexisting species, and the fittest contenders dominate over the rest in evolution. The dynamics of this selection is studied using a simple linear model. It has similarities to…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
This paper focuses on the maximum speed at which biological evolution can occur. I derive inequalities that limit the rate of evolutionary processes driven by natural selection, mutations, or genetic drift. These \emph{rate limits} link the…
New ideas are often thought to arise from recombining existing knowledge. Yet despite rapid publication growth - and expanding opportunities for recombination - scientific breakthroughs remain rare. This gap between productivity and…
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…
Evolvability is an important feature that impacts the ability of evolutionary processes to find interesting novel solutions and to deal with changing conditions of the problem to solve. The estimation of evolvability is not straightforward…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
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…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Decades of scientific inquiry have sought to understand how evolution fosters cooperation, a concept seemingly at odds with the belief that evolution should produce rational, self-interested individuals. Most previous work has focused on…
The study of the evolution of cooperative behaviours --which provide benefits to others-- and altruism --which provides benefits to others at a cost to oneself-- has been on the core of the evolutionary game theoretical framework since its…
As part of a generalized "prisoners' dilemma", is considered that the evolution of a population with a full set of behavioral strategies limited only by the depth of memory. Each subsequent generation of the population successively loses…
The key idea of this model is that firms are the result of an evolutionary process. Based on demand and supply considerations the evolutionary model presented here derives explicitly Gibrat's law of proportionate effects as the result of…
Competition between a complex system's constituents and a corresponding reward mechanism based on it have profound influence on the functioning, stability, and evolution of the system. But determining the dominance hierarchy or ranking…