Related papers: Laboratory biases hinder Eco-Evo-Devo integration:…
Communication signals often comprise an array of colors, lines, spots, notes or odors that are arranged in complex patterns, melodies or blends. Receiver perception is assumed to influence preference and thus the evolution of signal design,…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
In order to make a case for or against a trend in the evolution of complexity in biological evolution, complexity needs to be both rigorously defined and measurable. A recent information-theoretic (but intuitively evident) definition…
Instructive influence of environment on heredity has been a debated topic for centuries. Darwin's identification of natural selection coupled to chance variation as the driving force for evolution, against a formal interpretation proposed…
An evolution between a system and its environment which leads to pure dephasing of the system may either be a result of entanglement building up between the system and the environment or not (the second option is only possible for initially…
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…
[Context & Motivation] Adaptive systems are an important research area. The dominant reason for adaptivity in systems are changes in the environment. Thus, it is an important question how to model the environment and how to determine the…
The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…
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,…
Non-uniform rates of morphological evolution and evolutionary increases in organismal complexity, captured in metaphors like "adaptive zones", "punctuated equilibrium" and "blunderbuss patterns", require more elaborate explanations than a…
Do ecosystems primarily reflect evolutionary history or current environment? Predicting land-atmosphere exchange hinges on this unresolved question. Plant traits adapt to particular environments over evolutionary timescales, yet their…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
Many biological processes can be thought of as the result of an underlying dynamics in which the system repeatedly undergoes distinct and abortive trajectories with the dynamical process only ending when some specific process, purpose,…
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…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
A primary motivation for research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of natural ecosystems. Ecosystems arc thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic…
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…
Evolutionary deep intelligence synthesizes highly efficient deep neural networks architectures over successive generations. Inspired by the nature versus nurture debate, we propose a study to examine the role of external factors on the…
Ecology and evolution under changing environments are important in many subfields of biology with implications for medicine. Here, we explore an example: the consequences of fluctuating environments on the emergence of antibiotic…
A central goal of evolutionary biology is to explain the origins and distribution of diversity across life. Beyond species or genetic diversity, we also observe diversity in the circuits (genetic or otherwise) underlying complex functional…