creators_name: Turney, Peter editors_name: Wu, Annie type: confpaper datestamp: 2002-10-09 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:03 metadata_visibility: show title: Increasing Evolvability Considered as a Large-Scale Trend in Evolution ispublished: pub subjects: bio-evo subjects: bio-theory full_text_status: public keywords: evolutionary trends, evolutionary progress, large-scale trends, evolvability, Baldwin effect abstract: 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 increasing evolvability are satisfied in biological and cultural evolution. We claim that increasing evolvability is a large-scale trend in evolution. This hypothesis leads to testable predictions about biological and cultural evolution. date: 1999 date_type: published pagerange: 43-46 refereed: TRUE referencetext: Altenberg, L. (1994). The evolution of evolvability in genetic programming. In: Advances in Genetic Programming, K. E. Kinnear Jr., (ed.). MIT Press. Anderson, R.W. (1995). Learning and evolution: A quantitative genetics approach. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 175, 89-101. Ayala F.J. (1974). The concept of biological progress. In Studies in the Philosophy of Biology, ed. F.J. Ayala, T. Dobzhansky,19:339-55. New York: Macmillan. Ayala F.J. (1988). Can "progress" be defined as a biological concept? In Evolutionary Progress, ed. M Nitecki, pp. 75-96. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bedau, M.A. and Seymour, R. (1995). Adaptation of mutation rates in a simple model of evolution. Complexity International, 2. [http://www.csu.edu.au/ci/vol2/mab2nd/mab2nd.html] Dawkins, R. (1989). The evolution of evolvability. In: Artificial Life, C. Langton, (ed.). Addison-Wesley. Dawkins, R. (1996). Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Gould S.J. (1988). Trends as changes in variance: A new slant on progress and directionality in evolution. Journal of Paleontology, 62, 319-29. Gould S.J. (1997). Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York: Harmony. Hinton, G.E., and Nowlan, S.J. (1987). How learning can guide evolution. Complex Systems, 1, 495-502. Kurzweil, R. (1999). The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Viking Press. McShea, D.W. (1998). Possible largest-scale trends in organismal evolution: Eight "Live Hypotheses". Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 29, 293-318. [http://biomedical.AnnualReviews.org/cgi/content/abstract/4/29/293] Simon, H.A. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106, 467-482. Turney, P.D. (1989). The architecture of complexity: A new blueprint. Synthese, 79, 515-542. Turney, P.D. (1996). How to shift bias: Lessons from the Baldwin effect. Evolutionary Computation, 4, 271-295. Wagner, G.P. and Altenberg, L. (1996). Complex adaptations and the evolution of evolvability. Evolution, 50, 967- 976. [http://pueo.mhpcc.edu/~altenber/PAPERS/CAEE/] Whitley, D. (1989). The GENITOR algorithm and selective pressure. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (ICGA-89), pp. 116-121. California: Morgan Kaufmann. citation: Turney, Peter (1999) Increasing Evolvability Considered as a Large-Scale Trend in Evolution. [Conference Paper] document_url: http://cogprints.org/2499/1/evolvability.pdf