Related papers: The Great Filter hypothesis -- a new Great Filter?
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
An expanding civilization could rapidly spread through the galaxy, so the absence of extraterrestrial settlement in the solar system implies that such expansionist civilizations do not exist. This argument, often referred to as the Fermi…
In filtering, each output is produced by a certain number of different inputs. We explore the statistics of this degeneracy in an explicitly treatable filtering problem in which filtering performs the maximal compression of relevant…
A two-types, discrete-time population model with finite, constant size is constructed, allowing for a general form of frequency-dependent selection and skewed offspring distribution. Selection is defined based on the idea that individuals…
The implications of technological innovation for sustainability are becoming increasingly complex with information technology moving machines from being mere tools for production or objects of consumption to playing a role in economic…
This text introduces the twin deadlocks of strong artificial life. Conceptualization of life is a deadlock both because of the existence of a continuum between the inert and the living, and because we only know one instance of life.…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
We model an enclosed system of bacteria, whose motility-induced phase separation is coupled to slow population dynamics. Without noise, the system shows both static phase separation and a limit cycle, in which a rising global population…
When predicting the fate and consequences of recurring deleterious mutations in self-fertilising populations most models developed make the assumption that populations have discrete non-overlapping generations. This makes them biologically…
The Turing machine, as it was presented by Turing himself, models the calculations done by a person. This means that we can compute whatever any Turing machine can compute, and therefore we are Turing complete. The question addressed here…
Till date we have not made Contact with any Extraterrestrial civilizations. The Fermi Paradox remains a paradox - the Great Silence prevails. In the light of the Rare Earth hypothesis, it seems that advanced life is exceedingly rare in the…
We live in a world brimming with uncertainty, where we constantly have to make a lot of decisions under incomplete information. We are firm believers that our subjective belief cannot be computed by rigorous mathematical formula; instead…
We present an alternative domain concerning mathematics to investigate universal evolution mechanisms by focusing on large cycles theory (LCT) - a simplified version of well-known hamiltonian graph theory. LCT joins together a number of…
Nature provides us with abundant examples of how large numbers of individuals can make decisions without the coordination of a central authority. Social insects, birds, fishes, and many other living collectives, rely on simple interaction…
Natural selection and random drift are competing phenomena for explaining the evolution of populations. Combining a highly fit mutant with a population structure that improves the odds that the mutant spreads through the whole population…
The main power of artificial intelligence is not in modeling what we already know, but in creating solutions that are new. Such solutions exist in extremely large, high-dimensional, and complex search spaces. Population-based search…
For over hundreds of millions of years, sea turtles and their ancestors have swum in the vast expanses of the ocean. They have undergone a number of evolutionary changes, leading to speciation and sub-speciation. However, in the past few…
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to reshape the way individuals communicate and interact. While this form of AI has the potential to efficiently make numerous human decisions, there is limited understanding of how…
Weak selection, which means a phenotype is slightly advantageous over another, is an important limiting case in evolutionary biology. Recently it has been introduced into evolutionary game theory. In evolutionary game dynamics, the…
Different evolutionary models are known to make disparate predictions for the success of an invading mutant in some situations. For example, some evolutionary mechanics lead to amplification of selection in structured populations, while…