Related papers: Morphological Development at the Evolutionary Time…

Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we…

Evolutionary robot systems are usually affected by the properties of the environment indirectly through selection. In this paper, we present and investigate a system where the environment also has a direct effect: through regulation. We…

Motivation: Characterising the changes in cortical morphology across the lifespan is fundamental for a range of research and clinical applications. Most studies to date have found a monotonic decrease in commonly used morphometrics, such as…

Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…

In Evolutionary Robotics, evolutionary algorithms are used to co-optimize morphology and control. However, co-optimizing leads to different challenges: How do you optimize a controller for a body that often changes its number of inputs and…

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…

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?…

By unifying three foundational principles of modern biology, we develop a mathematical framework to analyze the growing tree of life. Contrary to the static case, where the analogy between phylogenetic trees and the tree that grows in soil…

We observe a large variety of robots in terms of their bodies, sensors, and actuators. Given the commonalities in the skill sets, teaching each skill to each different robot independently is inefficient and not scalable when the large…

Designing robots by hand can be costly and time consuming, especially if the robots have to be created with novel materials, or be robust to internal or external changes. In order to create robots automatically, without the need for human…

The evolutionary biology of aging is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of aging and how to develop anti-aging treatments. Thus far most evolutionary theory concerns the genetics of aging with limited physiological integration.…

We introduce a modeling tool which can evolve a set of 3D objects in a functionality-aware manner. Our goal is for the evolution to generate large and diverse sets of plausible 3D objects for data augmentation, constrained modeling, as well…

Evolutionary branching is analysed in a stochastic, individual-based population model under mutation and selection. In such models, the common assumption is that individual reproduction and life career are characterised by values of a…

Mixed microbial communities, usually composed of various bacterial and fungal species, are fundamental in a plethora of environments, from soil to human gut and skin. Their evolution is a paradigmatic example of intertwined dynamics, where…

Natural evolution has produced a tremendous diversity of functional organisms. Many believe an essential component of this process was the evolution of evolvability, whereby evolution speeds up its ability to innovate by generating a more…

We use a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network approach to learn morphological evolution driven by surface diffusion. To this aim we first produce a training set using phase field simulations. Intentionally, we insert in such a set only…

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…

We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…

Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…

Unlike most human-engineered systems, many biological systems rely on emergent behaviors from low-level interactions, enabling greater diversity and superior adaptation to complex, dynamic environments. This study explores emergent…