13 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Rosangela Canino-Koning, Michael J. Wiser, Charles Ofria, Laurent Keller
'Laurent Keller'] Genetic spaces are often described in terms of fitness landscapes or genotype-to-phenotype maps, where each genetic sequence is associated with phenotypic properties and linked to other genotypes that are a single mutational step away. The positions close to a genotype make up its “mutational…
Laura M. Grabowski, David M. Bryson, Fred C. Dyer, Robert T. Pennock + 2 more
'Charles Ofria' 'Paul Graham'] Investigating the evolution of animal behavior is difficult. The fossil record leaves few clues that would allow us to recapitulate the path that evolution took to build a complex behavior, and the large population sizes and long time scales required prevent us from re-evolving such…
Jason N. Bundy, Charles Ofria, Richard E. Lenski
Gould’s thought experiment of “replaying life’s tape” provides a conceptual framework for experiments that quantify the contributions of adaptation, chance, and history to evolutionary outcomes. For example, we can empirically measure how varying the depth of history in one environment influences subsequent evolution…
Thomas LaBar, Christoph Adami
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes, this does not automatically imply that strong selection enhances the chance for…
David A. Baum, Niles Lehman
The information contained in life exists in two forms, analog and digital. Analog information is manifest mainly in the differing concentrations of chemicals that get passed from generation to generation and can vary from cell to cell. Digital information is encoded in linear polymers such as DNA and RNA, whose side…
Kristen M. Martinet, Brea Dace, Luke J. Harmon, Shaelyn Pearson + 4 more
The outcome of evolution sometimes appears to be predictable, as in the evolution of the same characteristics independently in convergent evolution. Other times, evolution’s path depends on starting conditions or chance events, and some forms evolve just once and never appear again. Is convergence, and by implication…
Nicola Milano, Stefano Nolfi, Suzannah Rutherford
We demonstrate how the need to cope with operational faults enables evolving circuits to find more fit solutions. The analysis of the results obtained in different experimental conditions indicates that, in absence of faults, evolution tends to select circuits that are small and have low phenotypic variability and…
Federica Russo
Technologies have always been bearers of profound changes in science, society, and any other aspect of life. The latest technological revolution-the digital revolution-is no exception in this respect. This paper presents the revolution brought about by digital technologies through the lenses of a specific approach: the…
Troy Day
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 rests, in part, on the scope of its applicability. A great deal of this theory…
Bertalan Mesko
1.## The evolution of medical technology Physicians used to make informed decisions with a very limited set of tools but a growing amount of experience and knowledge that spans generations. With the birth of modern medicine in the 18th century, the practice of medicine has gradually become dependent on the use of…
Jonathan R. Walsh, Aaron M. Smith, Yannick Pouliot, David Li-Bland + 2 more
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by a complex set of clinical assessments. We use an unsupervised machine learning model called a Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machine (CRBM) to learn the relationships between covariates commonly used to characterize subjects and their disease…
Julian Z. Xue, Leonid Chindelevich, Frédéric Guichard
Many well-documented macro-evolutionary phenomena, such as increases in organization hierarchy, or sudden and episodic creation of new taxa, still challenge current evolutionary theories. Here we show a new mechanism that can explain them. We begin by showing how the order of mutations can alter evolutionary…
Mauricio González-Forero
Mathematically integrating genetics, development, and evolution is a longstanding challenge. Here I develop general mathematical theory that integrates sexual, discrete, multilocus genetics, development, and evolution. This yields an exact method to describe the evolutionary dynamics of allele frequencies and linkage…