Evolution, providence, and Gouldian contingency

Providence, Freedom, and Human Destiny

Distributed Contingency Logic and Security

In information security, ignorance is not bliss. It is always stated that hiding the protocols (let the other be ignorant about it) does not increase the security of organizations. However, there are cases that ignorance creates protocols. In this paper, we propose distributed contingency logic, a proper extension of contingency (ignorance) logic. Intuitively, a formula is distributed contingen...

Dynamic landscapes: a model of context and contingency in evolution.

Although the basic mechanics of evolution have been understood since Darwin, debate continues over whether macroevolutionary phenomena are driven by the fitness structure of genotype space or by ecological interaction. In this paper we propose a simple model capturing key features of fitness-landscape and ecological models of evolution. Our model describes evolutionary dynamics in a high-dimens...

Critical Notice: Cycles of contingency – developmental systems and evolution

The themes, problems and challenges of developmental systems theory as described in Cycles of Contingency are discussed. We argue in favor of a robust approach to philosophical and scientific problems of extended heredity and the integration of behavior, development, inheritance, and evolution. Problems with Sterelny’s proposal to evaluate inheritance systems using his ‘Hoyle criteria’ are disc...

Contingency and entrenchment in protein evolution under purifying selection.

The phenotypic effect of an allele at one genetic site may depend on alleles at other sites, a phenomenon known as epistasis. Epistasis can profoundly influence the process of evolution in populations and shape the patterns of protein divergence across species. Whereas epistasis between adaptive substitutions has been studied extensively, relatively little is known about epistasis under purifyi...