Related papers: Quantifying exaptation in scientific evolution
Many complex adaptive systems contain a large diversity of specialized components. The specialization at the level of the microscopic degrees of freedom, and diversity at the level of the system as a whole are phenomena that appear during…
Ecosystems dynamics is often considered as driven by a coupling of species' resource consumption and its population size dynamics. Such resource-population dynamics is captured by MacArthur-type models. One biologically relevant feature…
Given the evolution of an arbitrary open quantum system, we formulate a general and unambiguous method to separate the internal energy change of the system into an entropy-related contribution and a part causing no entropy change,…
We introduce a quantitative measure of the capacity of a small biological network to evolve. We apply our measure to a stochastic description of the experimental setup of Guet et al. (Science 296:1466, 2002), treating chemical inducers as…
The semantics used for particular terms in an academic field organically evolve over time. Tracking this evolution through inspection of published literature has either been from the perspective of Linguistic scholars or has concentrated…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
Despite the apparent cross-disciplinary interactions among scientific fields, a formal description of their evolution is lacking. Here we describe a novel approach to study the dynamics and evolution of scientific fields using a…
While evolution has inspired algorithmic methods of heuristic optimisation, little has been done in the way of using concepts of computation to advance our understanding of salient aspects of biological phenomena. We argue that under…
There is an overall perception of increased interdisciplinarity in science, but this is difficult to confirm quantitatively owing to the lack of adequate methods to evaluate subjective phenomena. This is no different from the difficulties…
The problem of identifying common concepts in the sciences and deciding when new ideas have emerged is an open one. Metascience researchers have sought to formalize principles underlying stages in the life-cycle of scientific research,…
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…
The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…
This paper introduces the concept of hyperpolation: a way of generalising from a limited set of data points that is a peer to the more familiar concepts of interpolation and extrapolation. Hyperpolation is the task of estimating the value…
Self-organization is the autonomous assembly of a network of interacting components into a stable, organized pattern. This article shows that the process of self-assembly can be encoded in terms of evolutionary entropy, a statistical…
The notion of entropy penetrates much of science. A key feature of the all-important notion of Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon entropy is its extensivity (additivity over independent subsystems). However, there is a need for other quantities. In…
At Alife VI, Mark Bedau proposed some evolutionary statistics as a means of classifying different evolutionary systems. Ecolab, whilst not an artificial life system, is a model of an evolving ecology that has advantages of mathematical…
All living things exhibit adaptations that enable them to survive and reproduce in the natural environment that they inhabit. From a biological standpoint, it has long been understood that adaptation comes from natural selection, whereby…
The interrelationships of the fundamental biological processes natural selection, mutation, and stochastic drift are quantified by the entropy rate of Moran processes with mutation, measuring the long-run variation of a Markov process. The…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
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…