Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory

Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory

Most evolutionary thinking is based on the notion of fitness and related ideas such as fitness landscapes and evolutionary optima. Nevertheless, it is often unclear what fitness actually is, and its meaning often depends on the context. Here we argue that fitness should not be a basal ingredient in verbal or mathematical descriptions of evolution. Instead, we propose that evolutionary birth-dea...

Towards A Mathematical Foundation Of Minimum-variance Theory

In [11] the authors proposed the minimum-variance theory which accounts for arm and eye movements with noise signal inputs. Here we present a detailed theoretical analysis of the theory and analytical solutions of the theory are obtained. Furthermore we propose a new version of the minimum-variance theory, which is more realistic for a biological system. For the new version numerically we show ...

Towards a richer evolutionary game theory.

Most examples of the application of evolutionary game theory to problems in biology involve highly simplified models. I contend that it is time to move on and include much more richness in models. In particular, more thought needs to be given to the importance of (i) between-individual variation; (ii) the interaction between individuals, and hence the process by which decisions are reached; (ii...

Towards a Logical Foundation for Qualitative Decision Theory

The purpose of this abstract is to motivate and outline a logical theory of preference that, arose from some very concrete and practical considerations. For some time now [6], we have been working on a formal model for representing and processing (such a.s laying out) structured electronic documents. One of the sub-problems in our project w&s designing a declarative language in wMch graphic and...

Optimal sex allocation: steps towards a mechanistic theory