Related papers: The Biological Concept of Neoteny in Evolutionary …
Neoteny, also spelled Paedomorphosis, can be defined in biological terms as the retention by an organism of juvenile or even larval traits into later life. In some species, all morphological development is retarded; the organism is…
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…
Segmentation of a colour image composed of different kinds of texture regions can be a hard problem, namely to compute for an exact texture fields and a decision of the optimum number of segmentation areas in an image when it contains…
Many biological processes have been the source of inspiration for heuristic methods that generate high-quality solutions to solve optimization and search problems. This thesis presents an epigenetic technique for Evolutionary Algorithms,…
Evolutionary success depends on the capacity to adapt: organisms must respond to environmental challenges through both genetic innovation and lifetime learning. The gene-centric paradigm attributes evolutionary causality exclusively to…
An increasing number of dissident voices claim that the standard neo-Darwinian view of genes as 'leaders' and phenotypes as 'followers' during the process of adaptive evolution should be turned on its head. This idea is older than the…
Plasticity-led evolution is a form of evolution where a change in the environment induces novel traits via phenotypic plasticity, after which the novel traits are genetically accommodated over generations under the novel environment. This…
Evolutionary algorithms, inspired by natural evolution, aim to optimize difficult objective functions without computing derivatives. Here we detail the relationship between population genetics and evolutionary optimization and formulate a…
Behavior domination is proposed as a tool for understanding and harnessing the power of evolutionary systems to discover and exploit useful stepping stones. Novelty search has shown promise in overcoming deception by collecting diverse…
Biological genotypes do not code directly for phenotypes; developmental physiology is the control layer that separates genomes from capacities ascertained by selection. A key aspect is competency, as cells are not a passive material but…
Diversity is an important factor in evolutionary algorithms to prevent premature convergence towards a single local optimum. In order to maintain diversity throughout the process of evolution, various means exist in literature. We analyze…
"Epigenetic Tracking" is a model of systems of biological cells, able to generate arbitrary 2 or 3-dimensional cellular shapes of any kind and complexity (in terms of number of cells, number of colours, etc.) starting from a single cell. If…
Evolutionary algorithms have recently been used to create a wide range of artistic work. In this paper, we propose a new approach for the composition of new images from existing ones, that retain some salient features of the original…
Evolutionary algorithms are metaheuristic techniques that derive inspiration from the natural process of evolution. They can efficiently solve (generate acceptable quality of solution in reasonable time) complex optimization (NP-Hard)…
This paper describes an Artificial Embryology method (called ``Epigenetic Tracking'') to generate predefined arbitrarily shaped 2-dimensional arrays of cells by means of evolutionary techniques. It is based on a model of development, whose…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
Segmentation of a colour image composed of different kinds of texture regions can be a hard problem, namely to compute for an exact texture fields and a decision of the optimum number of segmentation areas in an image when it contains…
Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow,…
Epigenetic Tracking is a mathematical model of biological cells, originally conceived to study embryonic development. Computer simulations proved the capacity of the model to generate complex 3-dimensional cellular structures, and the…
This paper deals with a model of cellular growth called "Epigenetic Tracking", whose key features are: i) distinction bewteen "normal" and "driver" cells; ii) presence in driver cells of an epigenetic memory, that holds the position of the…