Related papers: Bacteria are not Lamarckian
Evolutionary robot systems offer two principal advantages: an advanced way of developing robots through evolutionary optimization and a special research platform to conduct what-if experiments regarding questions about evolution. Our study…
Our understanding of evolution is shaped strongly by how we conceive of its fundamental causes. In the original Modern Synthesis, evolution was defined as a process of shifting the frequencies of available alleles at many loci affecting a…
At the fundamental conceptual level, two alternatives have traditionally been considered for how mutations arise and how evolution happens: 1) random mutation and natural selection, and 2) Lamarckism. Recently, the theory of…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…
Natural selection successfully explains how organisms accumulate adaptive change despite that traits acquired over a lifetime are eliminated at the end of each generation. However, in some domains that exhibit cumulative, adaptive change --…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Darwinism conceives evolution as a consequence of random variation and natural selection, hence it is based on a materialistic, i.e. matter-based, view of science inspired by classical physics. But matter in itself is considered a very…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
The problem of the rate and mechanisms of biological evolution was considered. It was shown that species could not be formed due to undirected mutations in characteristic times of about one million years. A mechanism of deterministic…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
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,…
Darwin's book, Origin of the Species has been a source of public controversy for more than hundred and fifty years. Court cases and mountains of words have not dispelled this controversy. In this paper, a quantitative approach using simple…
The purpose of this roadmap article is to draw attention to a paradigm shift in our understanding of evolution towards a perspective of ecological-evolutionary feedback, highlighted through two recent highly simplified examples of rapid…
Several aspects of mathematical astrobiology are discussed. It is argued that around the time of the origin of life the handedness of biomolecules must have established itself through an instability. Possible pathways of producing a certain…
The original hypothesis about Three-stage origin of life (TOL) on the Earth is developed and discussed. The role of the temperature factor in life origin is considered. It is supposed, that three stages of abiogenesis (DNA world, RNA world…
Lamarckian inheritance has been shown to be a powerful accelerator in systems where the joint evolution of robot morphologies and controllers is enhanced with individual learning. Its defining advantage lies in the offspring inheriting…
A common assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing evolution of complexity appear more nuanced. Evolution is deeply connected to learning, where…
Natural selection explains how life has evolved over millions of years from more primitive forms. The speed at which this happens, however, has sometimes defied formal explanations when based on random (uniformly distributed) mutations.…