Related papers: Evolution of Complexity: Introduction to the Works…
Combinatorial evolution - the creation of new things through the combination of existing things - can be a powerful way to evolve rather than design technical objects such as electronic circuits. Intriguingly, this seems to be an ongoing…
When a biological system robustly corrects component-level errors, the direct pressure on component performance declines. Components may become less reliable, maintain more genetic variability, or drift neutrally in design, creating the…
A fundamental question in the conjunction of information theory, biophysics, bioinformatics and thermodynamics relates to the principles and processes that guide the development of natural intelligence in natural environments where…
One of the properties that make ecological systems so unique is the range of complex behavioural patterns that can be exhibited by even the simplest communities with only a few species. Much of this complexity is commonly attributed to…
Emergence is a phenomenon taken for granted in science but also still not well understood. We have developed a model of artificial genetic evolution intended to allow for emergence on genetic, population and social levels. We present the…
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…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
Molecular biology features numerous complexes of proteins that coordinate in an interlocking fashion to fulfill different functions. Adaptive evolution explains some of this complexity, but needn't be the default when neutral explanations…
Artificial life is a research field studying what processes and properties define life, based on a multidisciplinary approach spanning the physical, natural and computational sciences. Artificial life aims to foster a comprehensive study of…
Hierarchical structure is an essential part of complexity, important notion relevant for a wide range of applications ranging from biological population dynamics through robotics to social sciences. In this paper we propose a simple…
The emergence of multicellularity and developmental programs are among the major problems of evolutionary biology. Traditionally, research in this area has been based on the combination of data analysis and experimental work on one hand and…
We propose a tractable unified framework to study the evolution and interaction of model-misspecification concerns and complexity aversion in repeated decision problems. This aims to capture environments where decision makers worry that…
I consider the many ways in which evolved information-flows are restricted and metabolic resources protected and hidden -- the thesis of living phenomena as evolutionary cryptosystems. I present the information theory of secrecy systems and…
The rising complexity of our terrestrial surrounding is an empirical fact. Details of this process evaded description in terms of physics for long time attracting attention and creating myriad of ideas including non-scientific ones. In this…
The theory of interaction-based evolution argues that, at the most basic level of analysis, there is a third alternative for how adaptive evolution works besides a) accidental mutation and natural selection and b) Lamarckism, namely, c)…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
Creating autonomous, self-supporting, self-replicating, sustainable systems is a great challenge. To some extent, understanding life means not only being able to create it from scratch, but also improving, supporting, saving it, or even…
The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective knowledge. This paper reviews the…
Evolution gave rise to creatures that are arguably more sophisticated than the greatest human-designed systems. This feat has inspired computer scientists since the advent of computing and led to optimization tools that can evolve complex…
In this paper we present a novel tool to evaluate problem solving systems. Instead of using a system to solve a problem, we suggest using the problem to evaluate the system. By finding a numerical representation of a problem's complexity,…