Related papers: Increasing Evolvability Considered as a Large-Scal…
In this paper, based on theories of complex adaptive systems, I argue that the main case for antitrust policy should be extended to include the criteria of "evolvability." To date, the main case focuses on economizing, including market…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
We define a novel quantitative strategy inspired by the ecological notion of nestedness to single out the scale at which innovation complexity emerges from the aggregation of specialized building blocks. Our analysis not only suggests that…
Evolution by natural selection, which is one of the most compelling themes of modern science, brought forth evolutionary algorithms and evolutionary computation, applying mechanisms of evolution in nature to various problems solved by…
Models of bacterial growth tend to be `irreversible', allowing for the number of bacteria in a colony to increase but not to decrease. By contrast, models of molecular self-assembly are usually `reversible', allowing for addition and…
A large class of evolutionary processes can be modeled by a rule which involves self-replication of some physical quantity with a non local rescaling. I show that a class of such models are exactly solvable -- in the discrete as well as…
Diffusion models, widely used in image generation, rely on iterative refinement to generate images from noise. Understanding this data evolution is important for model development and interpretability, yet challenging due to its…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
Evolution is one of the major omnipresent powers in the universe that has been studied for about two centuries. Recent scientific and technical developments make it possible to make the transition from passively understanding to actively…
Evolutionary computation (EC), as a powerful optimization algorithm, has been applied across various domains. However, as the complexity of problems increases, the limitations of EC have become more apparent. The advent of large language…
Information theoretic analysis of large evolved programs produced by running genetic programming for up to a million generations has shown even functions as smooth and well behaved as floating point addition and multiplication loose entropy…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
The spreading of evolutionary novelties across populations is the central element of adaptation. Unless population are well-mixed (like bacteria in a shaken test tube), the spreading dynamics not only depends on fitness differences but also…
In a recent study (Garrett, 2011), I described theoretical arguments and empirical evidence showing how civilization evolution might be considered from a purely physical basis. One implication is that civilization exhibits the property of…
Cooperation is a persistent behavioral pattern of entities pooling and sharing resources. Its ubiquity in nature poses a conundrum. Whenever two entities cooperate, one must willingly relinquish something of value to the other. Why is this…
Natural selection is general and powerful concept not only to explain evolutionary processes of biological organisms but also to design engineering systems such as genetic algorithms and particle filters. There is a surge of interest, both…
The structure of ecological networks, in particular food webs, determines their ability to evolve further, i.e. evolvability. The knowledge about how food web evolvability is determined by the structures of diverse ecological networks can…
Motivated by the results of recent laboratory experiments (Yoshida et al. Nature, 424, 303-306 (2003)) as well as many earlier field observations that evolutionary changes can take place in ecosystems over relatively short ecological time…