The purpose of this paper is to propose an extension to Lee Smolin’s hypothesis that our own universe belongs to a population of universes evolving by natural selection. Smolin’s hypothesis explains why the parameters of physics possess the values we observe them to possess, but depends upon the contingent fact that the universe is a quantum relativistic universe. It is proposed that the prior ...

The transformations George Williams initiated in evolutionary biology seem so blindingly obvious in retrospect that they spur the question of why he saw what no one else did. While most humans are prone to see only what theory predicts, Williams sees in bold relief whatever does not fit. Not an adaptationist or an anti-adaptationist, Williams is better described as a maladaptionist. The challen...

A paper by Korol et al. (1) in this issue demonstrates significant premating reproductive divergence between Drosophila melanogaster populations adapted to distinct, but closely adjacent, habitats in ‘‘Evolution Canyon’’ on Mt. Carmel, Israel. The authors suggest that reproductive isolation has evolved in situ as a result of adaptive divergence in response to the contrasting environments of nor...

The evolution of cumulative adaptive culture has received widespread interest in recent years, especially the factors promoting its occurrence. Current evolutionary models suggest that an increase in population size may lead to an increase in cultural complexity via a higher rate of cultural transmission and innovation. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of natural s...

Is logic, feasibly, a product of natural selection? In this paper we treat this question as dependent upon the prior question of where logic is founded. After excluding other possibilities, we conclude that logic resides in our language, in the shape of inferential rules governing the logical vocabulary of the language. This means that knowledge of (the laws of) logic is inseparable from the po...

Analogies between evolutionary dynamics and statistical mechanics, such as Fisher’s second-law-like ”fundamental theorem of natural selection” and Wright’s “fitness landscapes”, have had a deep and fruitful influence on the development of evolutionary theory. Here I discuss a new conceptual link between evolution and statistical physics. I argue that natural selection can be viewed as a coarsen...

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Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are a stochastic searching and optimizing method inspired by the biological mechanism of natural selection and evolution. To improve the searching power of GAs for complicated problems, many deterministic measures, particularly, experience and/or expert knowledge-based heuristic rules, have been studied in the existing literature. This paper proposes a potentially more ...

Natural selection acts strongly on the proportional numbers of male and female offspring among the progeny of adults. The equilibrium is often one at which males and females are produced in roughly equal numbers, but under certain ecological and genetic circumstances there may be dramatic population-wide biases, and even in populations with balanced sex ratios, parents are often selected to pro...