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Living organisms must respond to environmental changes. Generally, accurate and rapid responses are provided by simple, unidirectional networks that connect inputs with outputs. Besides accuracy and speed, biological responses should also…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…
Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for…
Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow,…
We create a novel optimisation technique inspired by natural ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of genes which are distributed in a peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time;…
The effect of phenotypic plasticity on evolution, the so-called Baldwin effect, has been studied extensively for more than 100 years. Plasticity is known to influence the speed of evolution towards a specific genetic configuration, but…
Biological neural networks are characterized by their high degree of plasticity, a core property that enables the remarkable adaptability of natural organisms. Importantly, this ability affects both the synaptic strength and the topology of…
How do the same mechanisms that faithfully regenerate complex developmental programs in spite of environmental and genetic perturbations also permit responsiveness to environmental signals, adaptation, and genetic evolution? Using the…
Understanding the mechanisms of species coexistence has always been a fundamental topic in ecology. Classical theory predicts that interspecific competition may select for traits that stabilize niche differences, although recent work shows…
In physics of living systems, a search for relationships of a few macroscopic variables that emerge from many microscopic elements is a central issue. We evolved gene regulatory networks so that the expression of target genes (partial…
Questions on possible relationship between phenotypic plasticity and evolvability, as well as that between robustness and evolution have been addressed over decades in the field of evolution-development. By introducing an evolutionary…
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are typically confined to accomplishing pre-defined tasks by learning a set of static parameters. In contrast, biological neural networks (BNNs) can adapt to various new tasks by continually updating the…
This paper presents a real-time simulation involving ''protozoan-like'' cells that evolve by natural selection in a physical 2D ecosystem. Selection pressure is exerted via the requirements to collect mass and energy from the surroundings…
Non-genetic perturbations, such as environmental change or developmental noise, can induce novel phenotypes. If an induced phenotype confers a fitness advantage, selection may promote its genetic stabilization. Non-genetic perturbations can…
Artificial and natural neural network models are a new toolkit which could be potentially have been used for clarifying of complex brain functions. To attend this goal, such models need to be neurobiologically realistic. However, although…
Representations are internal models of the environment that can provide guidance to a behaving agent, even in the absence of sensory information. It is not clear how representations are developed and whether or not they are necessary or…
Many biological processes have been the source of inspiration for heuristic methods that generate high-quality solutions to solve optimization and search problems. This thesis presents an epigenetic technique for Evolutionary Algorithms,…
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…
Genetic regulation is a key component in development, but a clear understanding of the structure and dynamics of genetic networks is not yet at hand. In this paper we investigate these properties within an artificial genome model originally…
Phylogenetic trees are simple models of evolutionary processes. They describe conditionally independent divergent evolution of taxa from common ancestors. Phylogenetic trees commonly do not have enough flexibility to adequately model all…