A Simple Model of Unbounded Evolutionary Versatility as a Largest-Scale Trend in Organismal Evolution

A Simple Model of Unbounded Evolutionary Versatility*

The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but empirical and theoretical arguments undermine this belief. Natural selection results in organisms that are well adapted to their local environments, but it is not c...

بررسی روند تکامل صفات ریخت شناسی در گونه های ایرانی سردۀ Stachys از نعنائیان براساس توالی هسته ای nrITS

The evolutionary trend of the morphological characters of the genus Stachys in Iran, on the basis of nrITS se-quence data, was investigated. A total of 28 nrITS sequences, representing 26 species of Stachys as well as Betonica of-ficinalis and Melittis mellisophyllum, were obtained from GenBank. Patterns of character evolution were assessed for 10 vegetative and reproductive characters with emp...

Increasing Evolvability Considered as a Large-Scale Trend in Evolution

Evolvability is the capacity to evolve. This paper introduces a simple computational model of evolvability and demonstrates that, under certain conditions, evolvability can increase indefinitely, even when there is no direct selection for evolvability. The model shows that increasing evolvability implies an accelerating evolutionary pace. It is suggested that the conditions for indefinitely inc...

A review of agent-based modeling (ABM) concepts and some of its main applications in management science

We live in a very complex world where we face complex phenomena such as social norms and new technologies. To deal with such phenomena, social scientists often use reductionism approach where they reduce them to some lower-lever variables and model the relationships among them through a scheme of equations. This approach that is called equation based modeling (EBM) has some basic weaknesses in ...

Developing Adaptive Differential Evolution as a New Evolutionary Algorithm, Application in Optimization of Chemical Processes