Related papers: Emergence biases in molecular evolution
Scaling up language models has been shown to predictably improve performance and sample efficiency on a wide range of downstream tasks. This paper instead discusses an unpredictable phenomenon that we refer to as emergent abilities of large…
Biological evolution continuously refines the design of species, resulting in highly optimised organisms over hundreds of millennia. Intuitively, we expect that random changes-evolution's primary mechanism-are more likely to be harmful than…
Based on the study of cellular aging using the single-cell model organism of budding yeast and corroborated by other studies, we propose the Emergent Aging Model (EAM). EAM hypothesizes that aging is an emergent property of complex…
The fitness contribution of an allele at one genetic site may depend on alleles at other sites, a phenomenon known as epistasis. Epistasis can profoundly influence the process of evolution in populations under selection, and can shape the…
Understanding how genotypes map onto phenotypes, fitness, and eventually organisms is arguably the next major missing piece in a fully predictive theory of evolution. We refer to this generally as the problem of the genotype-phenotype map.…
Mutations can arise from the chance misincorporation of nucleotides during DNA replication or from DNA lesions that are not repaired correctly. We introduce a model that relates the source of mutations to their accumulation with cell…
Eco-evolutionary dynamics, or eco-evolution for short, are thought to involve rapid demography (ecology) and equally rapid phenotypic changes (evolution) leading to novel, emergent system behaviours. This focus on contemporary dynamics is…
Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phenotypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evolution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law…
Recent research has extended methods from the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into other disciplines. Most notably, one recent work creates a unified theoretical framework to understand evolutionary biology, machine…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
The genetic blueprint for the essential functions of life is encoded in DNA, which is translated into proteins -- the engines driving most of our metabolic processes. Recent advancements in genome sequencing have unveiled a vast diversity…
Molecular evolution is the process of simulating the natural evolution of molecules in chemical space to explore potential molecular structures and properties. The relationships between similar molecules are often described through…
Biological neural networks can perform complex computations to predict their environment, far above the limited predictive capabilities of individual neurons. While conventional approaches to understanding these computations often focus on…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
The evolution of structure in biology is driven by accretion and change. Accretion brings together disparate parts to form bigger wholes. Change provides opportunities for growth and innovation. Here we review patterns and processes that…
We study emergent communication in a multi-agent reinforcement learning setting, where the agents solve cooperative tasks and have access to a communication channel. The communication channel may consist of either discrete symbols or…
We study the problem of emergent communication, in which language arises because speakers and listeners must communicate information in order to solve tasks. In temporally extended reinforcement learning domains, it has proved hard to learn…
Mutations are typically classified by their effects on the nucleotide sequence and by their size. Here, we argue that if our main aim is to understand the effect of mutations on evolutionary outcomes (such as adaptation or speciation), we…
Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. To gain a fundamental understanding of resistance evolution, a combination of systematic experimental and theoretical approaches is required. Evolution experiments combined with…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…