Frail Hypotheses in Evolutionary Biology

Frail Hypotheses in Evolutionary Biology

In the last decades, under the headings of ‘‘mutation strategies,’’ ‘‘evolvability,’’ or ‘‘soft inheritance,’’ many ideas have been advanced on mechanisms assumed to promote innovative evolution beyond what one may anticipate from the classical model of random mutation and selection. Many population geneticists find these ideas superficially seducing but mathematically unfounded. While agreeing...

Consciousness, biology and quantum hypotheses.

Natural phenomena are reducible to quantum events in principle, but quantum mechanics does not always provide the best level of analysis. The many-body problem, chaotic avalanches, materials properties, biological organisms, and weather systems are better addressed at higher levels. Animals are highly organized, goal-directed, adaptive, selectionist, information-preserving, functionally redunda...

Evolutionary Hypotheses for Human Childhood

The origins of human childhood have fascinated scholars from many disciplines. Some researchers argue that childhood, and many other human characteristics, evolved by heterochrony, an evolutionary process that alters the timing of growth stages from ancestors to their descendants. Other scholars argue against heterochrony, but so far have not offered a well-developed alternative hypothesis. Thi...

Pairwise Comparison of Hypotheses in Evolutionary Learning

This paper investigates the use of evolutionary algorithms for the search of hypothesis space in machine learning tasks. As opposed to the common scalar evaluation function imposing a complete order onto the hypothesis space, we propose genetic search incorporating pairwise comparison of hypotheses. Particularly, we allow incomparability of hypotheses, what implies a partial order in the hypoth...

Glossary in Evolutionary Biology