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We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering…
Empirical evidence is presented which contradicts the established interpretation of the intraspecific genetic variability as the adaptive potential of the species: the uniform evolutionary tempo across the life kingdom, species…
Existing theoretical models of evolution focus on the relative fitness advantages of different mutants in a population while the dynamic behavior of the population size is mostly left unconsidered. We here present a generic stochastic model…
In this article we focus on evolving information systems. First a delimitation of the concept of evolution is provided, resulting in a first attempt to a general theory for such evolutions. The theory makes a distinction between the…
In previous work I proposed a framework for thinking about open-ended evolution. The framework characterised the basic processes required for Darwinian evolution as: (1) the generation of a phenotype from a genetic description; (2) the…
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
The origin of diversification and coexistence of genes and species have been traditionally studied in isolated biological levels. Ecological and evolutionary views have focused on the mechanisms that enable or constrain species coexistence,…
Selection theory requires multiple, distinct, simultaneously-actualized states. In cognition, each thought or cognitive state changes the 'selection pressure' against which the next is evaluated; they are not simultaneously selected…
Natural selection can create information. In particular, because of the action of natural selection, we can often learn something about an environment by examining local organisms, and vice versa. For example, the characteristics of a…
Many biological phenomena or social events critically depend on how information evolves in complex networks. However, a general theory to characterize information evolution is yet absent. Consequently, numerous unknowns remain about the…
The classic paradigms of Berry Picking and Information Foraging Theory have framed users as gatherers, opportunistically searching across distributed sources to satisfy evolving information needs. However, the rise of GenAI is driving a…
Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excellent, if not the best available account of inductive reasoning. This is so because there are general and definite rules for the change of subjective probabilities through…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
"Evidence and Evolution: the Logic behind the Science" was published in 2008 by Elliott Sober. It examines the philosophical foundations of the statistical arguments used to evaluate hypotheses in evolutionary biology, based on simple…
Simonton (2006) makes the unwarranted assumption that nonmonotonicity supports a Darwinian view of creativity. Darwin's theory of natural selection was motivated by a paradox that has no equivalent in creative thought: the paradox of how…
The Gaia hypothesis considers the life-environment coupled system as a single entity that acts to regulate and maintain habitable conditions on Earth. In this paper we discuss three mechanisms which could potentially lead to Gaia: Selection…
Evolution is a fundamental process that shapes the biological world we inhabit, and reinforcement learning is a powerful tool used in artificial intelligence to develop intelligent agents that learn from their environment. In recent years,…
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…
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…
The Darwinian paradigm of biological evolution is based on the separability of the variation and selection processes. As a result, the population thinking had always been an integral part of the Darwinian approach. I propose an alternative…