Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
review-article
Free access

Sex as an algorithm: the theory of evolution under the lens of computation

Published: 28 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Looking at the mysteries of evolution from a computer science point of view yields some unexpected insights.

Supplementary Material

Appendix (cacmsuppmaterial.pdf)
Additional information

References

[1]
Aldous, D. and Vazirani, U. 'Go with the winners' algorithms. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (1994). 492--501.
[2]
Arora, S., Hazan, E. and Kale, S. The multiplicative weights update method: A meta-algorithm and applications. Theory of Computing 8, 1 (2012), 121--164.
[3]
Athreya, K. and Ney, P. Branching Processes. Springer, 1972.
[4]
Babbage, C. The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. 2nd edn. John Murray, London, 1838.
[5]
Barton, N.H., Novak, S. and Paixão, T. Diverse forms of selection in evolution and computer science. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, 29 (2014), 10398--10399.
[6]
Bell, G. The Masterpiece of Nature: The Evolution and Genetics of Sexuality. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1982.
[7]
Chastain, E., Livnat, A., Papadimitriou, C. and Vazirani, U. Algorithms, games, and evolution. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, 29 (2014), 10620--10623.
[8]
Darwin, C. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Murray, London, 1859.
[9]
Feldman, M.W. Otto, P. and Christiansen, F.B. Population genetic perspectives on the evolution of recombination. Annual Review of Genetics 30 (1997), 261--295.
[10]
Fisher, R.A. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. The Clarendon Press, Oxford, U.K., 1930.
[11]
Fryxell, K.J. and Moon, W.-J. CpG mutation rates in the human genome are highly dependent on local GC content. Molecular Biology and Evolution 22 (2005), 650--658.
[12]
Goldberg, D. Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization and Machine Learning. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1989.
[13]
Graur, D. and Li, W.-H. Fundamentals of Molecular Evolution. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA, 2000.
[14]
Holland, J.H. Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems: An Introductory Analysis with Applications to Biology, Control, and Artificial Intelligence. U Michigan Press, 1975.
[15]
Johnson, D.S., Papadimitriou, C.H., and Yannakakis, M. How easy is local search? J. Computer and System Sciences 37, 1 (1988), 79--100.
[16]
Jong, K.A.D. Evolutionary Computation: A Unified Approach. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2006.
[17]
Kanade, V. Evolution with recombination. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, (2011), 837--846.
[18]
Kearns, M. Efficient noise-tolerant learning from statistical queries. J. ACM 45, 6 (1998), 983--1006.
[19]
Kimura, M. and Ohta, T. The average number of generations until fixation of a mutant gene in a finite population. Genetics 61, 3 (1969), 763.
[20]
Kirkpatrick, S., Gelatt, Jr, C.D. and Vecchi, M.P. Optimization by simulated annealing. Science 220 (1983), 671--680.
[21]
Lewontin, R.C. and Hubby, J.L. A molecular approach to the study of genic heterozygosity in natural populations; amount of variation and degree of heterozygosity in natural populations of Drosophila pseudoobscura. Genetics 54 (1966), 595--609.
[22]
Livnat, A. Interaction-based evolution: How natural selection and nonrandom mutation work together. Biology Direct 8, 1 (2013), 24.
[23]
Livnat, A., Feldman, M.W., Papadimitriou, C. and Pippenger, N. On the advantage to sexual species in diversification rates. Unpublished manuscript.
[24]
Livnat, A., Papadimitriou, C., Dushoff, J. and Feldman, M.W. A mixability theory for the role of sex in evolution. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, 50 (2008), 19803--19808.
[25]
Livnat, A., Papadimitriou, C. and Feldman, M.W. An analytical contrast between fitness maximization and selection for mixability. J. Theoretical Biology 273, 1 (2011), 232--234.
[26]
Livnat, A., Papadimitriou, C., Pippenger, N. and Feldman, M.W. Sex, mixability, and modularity. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, 4 (2010), 1452--1457.
[27]
Lynch, V.J., Leclerc, R.D., May, G. and Wagner, G.P. Transposon-mediated rewiring of gene regulatory networks contributed to the evolution of pregnancy in mammals. Nature Genetics 43 (2011), 1154--1159.
[28]
Mitchell, M. An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996.
[29]
Motwani, R. and Raghavan, P. Randomized Algorithms. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
[30]
Nagylaki, T., Hofbauer, J. and Brunovský, P. Convergence of multilocus systems under weak epistasis or weak selection. J. Mathematical Biology 38, 2 (1999), 103--133.
[31]
Nevo, E., Beiles, A. and Ben-Shlomo, R. The evolutionary significance of genetic diversity: Ecological, demographic and life history correlates. Lecture Notes in Biomathematics 53 (1984), 13--213.
[32]
Papadimitriou, C. and Steiglitz, K. Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity. Dover, 1998.
[33]
Rabani, Y. Rabinovich, Y. and Sinclair, A. A computational view of population genetics. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, (1995), 83--92.
[34]
Stearns, S.C. and Hoekstra, R.F. Evolution: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, New York, 2005.
[35]
Valiant, L. Probably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World. Basic Books, 2013.
[36]
Valiant, L.G. Evolvability. J. ACM 56, 1 (2009), 3.
[37]
Von Neumann, J. and A. W. Burks, A.W. Theory of self-reproducing automata. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks 5, 1 (1966), 3--14.
[38]
Williams, G.C. Adaptation and Natural Selection, 8th edition. Princeton University Press, 1996.
[39]
Wright, S. Evolution in Mendelian populations. Genetics 16 (1931), 97--159.
[40]
Wright, S. The distribution of gene frequencies in populations. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 23, 6 (1937), 307--320.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Evolution is driven by natural autoencoding: reframing species, interaction codes, cooperation and sexual reproductionProceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences10.1098/rspb.2022.2409290:1994Online publication date: Mar-2023
  • (2023)Resilience: The Key to Planetary and Societal SustainabilityIntroduction to Digital Humanism10.1007/978-3-031-45304-5_24(373-382)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2023
  • (2021)Efficiency vs. Resilience: Lessons from COVID-19Perspectives on Digital Humanism10.1007/978-3-030-86144-5_38(285-289)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2021
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Sex as an algorithm: the theory of evolution under the lens of computation

        Comments

        Information & Contributors

        Information

        Published In

        cover image Communications of the ACM
        Communications of the ACM  Volume 59, Issue 11
        November 2016
        118 pages
        ISSN:0001-0782
        EISSN:1557-7317
        DOI:10.1145/3013530
        • Editor:
        • Moshe Y. Vardi
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 28 October 2016
        Published in CACM Volume 59, Issue 11

        Permissions

        Request permissions for this article.

        Check for updates

        Qualifiers

        • Review-article
        • Popular
        • Refereed

        Contributors

        Other Metrics

        Bibliometrics & Citations

        Bibliometrics

        Article Metrics

        • Downloads (Last 12 months)550
        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)88
        Reflects downloads up to 02 Sep 2024

        Other Metrics

        Citations

        Cited By

        View all
        • (2023)Evolution is driven by natural autoencoding: reframing species, interaction codes, cooperation and sexual reproductionProceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences10.1098/rspb.2022.2409290:1994Online publication date: Mar-2023
        • (2023)Resilience: The Key to Planetary and Societal SustainabilityIntroduction to Digital Humanism10.1007/978-3-031-45304-5_24(373-382)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2023
        • (2021)Efficiency vs. Resilience: Lessons from COVID-19Perspectives on Digital Humanism10.1007/978-3-030-86144-5_38(285-289)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2021
        • (2020)The evolution of universal adaptations of life is driven by universal properties of matter: energy, entropy, and interactionF1000Research10.12688/f1000research.24447.39(626)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2020
        • (2020)The evolution of universal adaptations of life is driven by universal properties of matter: energy, entropy, and interactionF1000Research10.12688/f1000research.24447.29(626)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2020
        • (2020)The evolution of universal adaptations of life is driven by universal properties of matter: energy, entropy, and interactionF1000Research10.12688/f1000research.24447.19(626)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2020
        • (2020)From Consensus to Innovation. Evolving Towards Crowd-based User-Centered DesignInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2020.175333336:15(1460-1475)Online publication date: 28-Apr-2020
        • (2020)Memetic algorithms outperform evolutionary algorithms in multimodal optimisationArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2020.103345(103345)Online publication date: Jun-2020
        • (2020)Computational intractability law molds the topology of biological networksApplied Network Science10.1007/s41109-020-00268-05:1Online publication date: 24-Jun-2020
        • (2019)Computational Complexity as an Ultimate Constraint on EvolutionGenetics10.1534/genetics.119.302000212:1(245-265)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2019
        • Show More Cited By

        View Options

        View options

        PDF

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader

        Digital Edition

        View this article in digital edition.

        Digital Edition

        Magazine Site

        View this article on the magazine site (external)

        Magazine Site

        Get Access

        Login options

        Full Access

        Media

        Figures

        Other

        Tables

        Share

        Share

        Share this Publication link

        Share on social media