Related papers: Increasing Evolvability Considered as a Large-Scal…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
Why evolvability appears to have increased over evolutionary time is an important unresolved biological question. Unlike most candidate explanations, this paper proposes that increasing evolvability can result without any pressure to adapt.…
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…
Evolvability is an important feature that impacts the ability of evolutionary processes to find interesting novel solutions and to deal with changing conditions of the problem to solve. The estimation of evolvability is not straightforward…
Evolvability is defined as the ability of a population to generate heritable variation to facilitate its adaptation to new environments or selection pressures. In this article, we consider evolvability as a phenotypic trait subject to…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
Understanding how systems can be designed to be evolvable is fundamental to research in optimization, evolution, and complex systems science. Many researchers have thus recognized the importance of evolvability, i.e. the ability to find new…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
Designing evolutionary algorithms capable of uncovering highly evolvable representations is an open challenge; such evolvability is important because it accelerates evolution and enables fast adaptation to changing circumstances. This paper…
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…
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…
The process of evolutionary diversification unfolds in a vast genotypic space of potential outcomes. During the past century there have been remarkable advances in the development of theory for this diversification, and the theory's success…
Is undecidability a requirement for open-ended evolution (OEE)? Using methods derived from algorithmic complexity theory, we propose robust computational definitions of open-ended evolution and the adaptability of computable dynamical…
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…
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…
It has been hypothesized that one of the main reasons evolution has been able to produce such impressive adaptations is because it has improved its own ability to evolve -- "the evolution of evolvability". Rupert Riedl, for example, an…
Evolvability refers to the ability of an individual genotype (solution) to produce offspring with mutually diverse phenotypes. Recent research has demonstrated that divergent search methods, particularly novelty search, promote evolvability…
Evolution by natural selection can be seen an algorithm for generating creative solutions to difficult problems. More precisely, evolution by natural selection is a class of algorithms that share a set of properties. The question we address…
The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be" (1989, p.1). The study and pursuit of…