Evolvability of Natural and Artificial Systems

Evolvability of Natural and Artificial Systems

Evolvability in its simplest form is the ability of a population to respond to directional selection. More interestingly it means that some lineages show open-ended evolution by accumulating novel adaptations, and that some lineages complexity can increase indefinitely. Unlimited heredity is a precondition for such rich open-endedness, another one seems to be (analogous to) chemical combinatori...

Natural Selection Promotes Antigenic Evolvability

The hypothesis that evolvability - the capacity to evolve by natural selection - is itself the object of natural selection is highly intriguing but remains controversial due in large part to a paucity of direct experimental evidence. The antigenic variation mechanisms of microbial pathogens provide an experimentally tractable system to test whether natural selection has favored mechanisms that ...

Evolutionary Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems

Motivation Theories for Natural and Artificial Systems

Motivation is the cause of action (Mook, 1987). When we ask the question: “Why did he or she do that?” we are inquiring about an individual’s motivation. Motivation is though to have three primary functions: a directing function that to steers an individual’s behaviour towards or away from specific goals, an activating function that energises action in pursuit of goals and an organising functio...

Agency in Natural and Artificial Systems

We analyze the conditions for agency in natural and artificial systems. In the case of basic (natural) autonomous systems, self-construction and activity in the environment are two aspects of the same organization, the distinction between which is entirely conceptual: their sensorimotor activities are metabolic, realized according to the same principles and through the same material transformat...