相关论文: Quantifying exaptation in scientific evolution

The evolution and function of imitation have always been placed within the confines of animal learning and associated with its crucial role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution. Can imitation evolve as a form of phenotypic…

A key goal in studies of ecology and evolution is understanding the causes of phenotypic diversity in nature. Most traits of interest, such as those relating to morphology, life-history, immunity and behaviour are quantitative, and…

The evolution of cognition is frequently discussed as the evolution of cognitive abilities or the evolution of some neuronal structures in the brain. However, since such traits or abilities are often highly complex, understanding their…

The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…

`Entropy' appears as driving force in many different evolution equations, both deterministic and stochastic, and in these equations this `entropy' also takes different forms. We show how all these examples can be understood as different…

Knowledge production is often viewed as an endogenous process in which discovery arises through the recombination of existing theories, findings, and concepts. Yet given the vast space of potential recombinations, not all are equally…

Darwinian evolution can be illustrated as an uphill walk in a landscape, where the surface consists of genotypes, the height coordinates represent fitness, and each step corresponds to a point mutation. Epistasis, roughly defined as the…

Describing the evolution of science is a salient work not only for revealing the scientific trend but also for establishing a scientific classification system. In this paper, we investigate the evolution of science by observing the…

Quantum mechanics allows coherent superposition between different states of matter. This quality is responsible for major non-classical phenomena that occur in quantum systems. Beyond states, coherent superpositions are also possible…

The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…

One of the defining characteristics of human creativity is the ability to make conceptual leaps, creating something surprising from typical knowledge. In comparison, deep neural networks often struggle to handle cases outside of their…

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…

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…

Entropy is a measure of heterogeneity widely used in applied sciences, often when data are collected over space. Recently, a number of approaches has been proposed to include spatial information in entropy. The aim of entropy is to…

Shape is an important feature of physical systems although very seldom it is addressed in the framework of a quantitative description approach. In this paper we propose to interpret the shape of things as a physical manifestation of the…

We propose a new type of entropic descriptor that is able to quantify the statistical complexity (a measure of complex behaviour) by taking simultaneously into account the average departures of a system's entropy S from both its maximum…

Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…

We introduce a model for the emergence of innovations, in which cognitive processes are described as random walks on the network of links among ideas or concepts, and an innovation corresponds to the first visit of a node. The transition…

We apply a common measure of randomness, the entropy, in the context of iterated functions on a finite set with n elements. For a permutation, it turns out that this entropy is asymptotically (for a growing number of iterations) close to…

In this simple article, with possible applications in theoretical and applied physics, we suggest an original way to derive the expression of Shannon's entropy from a purely variational approach,using constraints. Based on the work of Edwin…