5 research outputs found
Antifragility Predicts the Robustness and Evolvability of Biological Networks through Multi-class Classification with a Convolutional Neural Network
Robustness and evolvability are essential properties to the evolution of
biological networks. To determine if a biological network is robust and/or
evolvable, it is required to compare its functions before and after mutations.
However, this sometimes takes a high computational cost as the network size
grows. Here we develop a predictive method to estimate the robustness and
evolvability of biological networks without an explicit comparison of
functions. We measure antifragility in Boolean network models of biological
systems and use this as the predictor. Antifragility occurs when a system
benefits from external perturbations. By means of the differences of
antifragility between the original and mutated biological networks, we train a
convolutional neural network (CNN) and test it to classify the properties of
robustness and evolvability. We found that our CNN model successfully
classified the properties. Thus, we conclude that our antifragility measure can
be used as a predictor of the robustness and evolvability of biological
networks.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figure
Sociality predicts orangutan vocal phenotype
In humans, individuals’ social setting determines which and how language is acquired. Social seclusion experiments show that sociality also guides vocal development in songbirds and marmoset monkeys, but absence of similar great ape data has been interpreted as support to saltational notions for language origin, even if such laboratorial protocols are unethical with great apes. Here we characterize the repertoire entropy of orangutan individuals and show that in the wild, different degrees of sociality across populations are associated with different ‘vocal personalities’ in the form of distinct regimes of alarm call variants. In high-density populations, individuals are vocally more original and acoustically unpredictable but new call variants are short lived, whereas individuals in low-density populations are more conformative and acoustically consistent but also exhibit more complex call repertoires. Findings provide non-invasive evidence that sociality predicts vocal phenotype in a wild great ape. They prove false hypotheses that discredit great apes as having hardwired vocal development programmes and non-plastic vocal behaviour. Social settings mould vocal output in hominids besides humans