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The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Quantum process tomography provides a means of measuring the evolution operator for a system at a fixed measurement time $t$. The problem of using that tomographic snapshot to predict the evolution operator at other times is generally…
The design space of networked embedded systems is very large, posing challenges to the optimisation of such platforms when it comes to support applications with real-time guarantees. Recent research has shown that a number of inter-related…
Evolution of genetic code is studied as the change in the choice of enzymes that are used to synthesize amino acids from the genetic information of nucleic acids. We propose the following theory: the differentiation of physiological states…
Environmental and genetic mutations can transform the cells in a co-operating healthy tissue into an ecosystem of individualistic tumour cells that compete for space and resources. Various selection forces are responsible for driving the…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
The role of historical contingency in the origin of life is one of the great unknowns in modern science. Only one example of life exists--one that proceeded from a single self-replicating organism (or a set of replicating hyper-cycles) to…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
Representations for black-box optimisation methods (such as evolutionary algorithms) are traditionally constructed using a delicate manual process. This is in contrast to the representation that maps DNAs to phenotypes in biological…
In real-world systems, phase transitions often materialize abruptly, making it difficult to design appropriate controls that help uncover underlying processes. Some agent-based computational models display transformations similar to phase…
The most prominent property of life on Earth is its ability to evolve. It is often taken for granted that self-replication--the characteristic that makes life possible--implies evolvability, but many examples such as the lack of…
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…
Disordered materials are often out of equilibrium and evolve very slowly. This allows a memory of the imposed strains or preparation conditions to be encoded in the material. Here we consider "directed aging", where the elastic properties…
We introduce a model of biological evolution where species evolve in response to biotic interactions and a fluctuating environmental stress. The species may either become extinct or mutate to acquire a new fitness value when the effective…
Is evolution always gradual or can it make leaps? We examine a mathematical model of an evolutionary process on a fitness landscape and obtain analytic solutions for the probability of multi-mutation leaps, that is, several mutations…
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?…
Control of the living cell functions with remarkable reliability despite the stochastic nature of the underlying molecular networks -- a property presumably optimized by biological evolution. We here ask to what extent the property of a…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
Theoretical analyses of evolution strategies are indispensable for gaining a deep understanding of their inner workings. For constrained problems, rather simple problems are of interest in the current research. This work presents a…
The network concept is increasingly used for the description of complex systems. Here we summarize key aspects of the evolvability and robustness of the hierarchical network-set of macromolecules, cells, organisms, and ecosystems. Listing…