4,874 research outputs found
Myths and Legends of the Baldwin Effect
This position paper argues that the Baldwin effect is widely
misunderstood by the evolutionary computation community. The
misunderstandings appear to fall into two general categories.
Firstly, it is commonly believed that the Baldwin effect is
concerned with the synergy that results when there is an evolving
population of learning individuals. This is only half of the story.
The full story is more complicated and more interesting. The Baldwin
effect is concerned with the costs and benefits of lifetime
learning by individuals in an evolving population. Several
researchers have focussed exclusively on the benefits, but there
is much to be gained from attention to the costs. This paper explains
the two sides of the story and enumerates ten of the costs and
benefits of lifetime learning by individuals in an evolving population.
Secondly, there is a cluster of misunderstandings about the relationship
between the Baldwin effect and Lamarckian inheritance of acquired
characteristics. The Baldwin effect is not Lamarckian. A Lamarckian
algorithm is not better for most evolutionary computing problems than
a Baldwinian algorithm. Finally, Lamarckian inheritance is not a
better model of memetic (cultural) evolution than the Baldwin effect
Bio-linguistic transition and Baldwin effect in an evolutionary naming-game model
We examine an evolutionary naming-game model where communicating agents are
equipped with an evolutionarily selected learning ability. Such a coupling of
biological and linguistic ingredients results in an abrupt transition: upon a
small change of a model control parameter a poorly communicating group of
linguistically unskilled agents transforms into almost perfectly communicating
group with large learning abilities. When learning ability is kept fixed, the
transition appears to be continuous. Genetic imprinting of the learning
abilities proceeds via Baldwin effect: initially unskilled communicating agents
learn a language and that creates a niche in which there is an evolutionary
pressure for the increase of learning ability.Our model suggests that when
linguistic (or cultural) processes became intensive enough, a transition took
place where both linguistic performance and biological endowment of our species
experienced an abrupt change that perhaps triggered the rapid expansion of
human civilization.Comment: 7 pages, minor changes, accepted in Int.J.Mod.Phys.C, proceedings of
Max Born Symp. Wroclaw (Poland), Sept. 2007. Java applet is available at
http://spin.amu.edu.pl/~lipowski/biolin.html or
http://www.amu.edu.pl/~lipowski/biolin.htm
Genetic Assimilation and Canalisation in the Baldwin Effect
The Baldwin Effect indicates that individually learned behaviours acquired during an organism’s lifetime can influence the evolutionary path taken by a population, without any direct Lamarckian transfer of traits from phenotype to genotype. Several computational studies modelling this effect have included complications that restrict its applicability. Here we present a simplified model that is used to reveal the essential mechanisms and highlight several conceptual issues that have not been clearly defined in prior literature. In particular, we suggest that canalisation and genetic assimilation, often conflated in previous studies, are separate concepts and the former is actually not required for non-heritable phenotypic variation to guide genetic variation. Additionally, learning, often considered to be essential for the Baldwin Effect, can be replaced with a more general phenotypic plasticity model. These simplifications potentially permit the Baldwin Effect to operate in much more general circumstances
Meta-Learning by the Baldwin Effect
The scope of the Baldwin effect was recently called into question by two
papers that closely examined the seminal work of Hinton and Nowlan. To this
date there has been no demonstration of its necessity in empirically
challenging tasks. Here we show that the Baldwin effect is capable of evolving
few-shot supervised and reinforcement learning mechanisms, by shaping the
hyperparameters and the initial parameters of deep learning algorithms.
Furthermore it can genetically accommodate strong learning biases on the same
set of problems as a recent machine learning algorithm called MAML "Model
Agnostic Meta-Learning" which uses second-order gradients instead of evolution
to learn a set of reference parameters (initial weights) that can allow rapid
adaptation to tasks sampled from a distribution. Whilst in simple cases MAML is
more data efficient than the Baldwin effect, the Baldwin effect is more general
in that it does not require gradients to be backpropagated to the reference
parameters or hyperparameters, and permits effectively any number of gradient
updates in the inner loop. The Baldwin effect learns strong learning dependent
biases, rather than purely genetically accommodating fixed behaviours in a
learning independent manner
Foundation to Promote Scholarship and Teaching 2013-2014 Awards
Proposal abstracts of 2013-2014 award recipients in a wide range of disciplinary areas
Natural selection. II. Developmental variability and evolutionary rate
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of
heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this
classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability
and learning enhance nonheritable phenotypic variation, which in turn can
accelerate evolutionary response. In this paper, I show how developmental
variability alters evolutionary dynamics by smoothing the landscape that
relates genotype to fitness. In a fitness landscape with multiple peaks and
valleys, developmental variability can smooth the landscape to provide a
directly increasing path of fitness to the highest peak. Developmental
variability also allows initial survival of a genotype in response to novel or
extreme environmental challenge, providing an opportunity for subsequent
adaptation. This initial survival advantage arises from the way in which
developmental variability smooths and broadens the fitness landscape.
Ultimately, the synergism between developmental processes and genetic variation
sets evolutionary rate
The dangers of hanging baskets: 'Regulatory myths' and media representations of health and safety regulation
The successful enforcement of health and safety regulation is reliant upon the ability of regulatory agencies to demonstrate the legitimacy of the system of regulatory controls. While 'big cases' are central to this process, there are also significant legitimatory implications associated with 'minor' cases, including media-reported tales of pettiness and heavy-handedness in the interpretation and enforcement of the law. The popular media regularly report stories of 'regulatory unreasonableness', and they can pass quickly into mainstream public knowledge. A story's appeal becomes more important than its factual veracity; they are a form of 'regulatory myth'. This paper discusses the implications of regulatory myths for health and safety regulators, and analyses their challenges for regulators, paying particular attention to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) which has made concerted efforts to address regulatory myths attaching to its activities. It will be shown that such stories constitute sustained normative challenges to the legitimacy of the regulator, and political challenges to the burgeoning regulatory state, because they reflect some of the key concerns of late-modern society
Four units in mythology for use in English classes in grades eight and nine
Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University, 1948. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive
On the spectral ideology of cultural globalization as social hauntology
Globalization allegedly constitutes one of the most used and abused concepts in the contemporary academic and lay lexicons alike. This paper pursues a deconstructive avenue for canvassing the semiotic economy of cultural globalization. The variegated ways whereby ideology has been framed in different semiotic perspectives (Peircean, structuralist, post-structuralist, neo-Marxist) are laid out. By engaging with the post-structuralist semiotic terrain, cultural globalization is identified with a transition from Baudrillard’s Political Economy of Signs towards a spectral ideology where signs give way to traces of différance. Subsequently, the process whereby globalization materializes is conceived as a social hauntology. In this context, global citizens engage in a constant retracing of the meaning of signs of globalization that crystallize as translocally flowing ideoscapes and mediascapes. The propounded thesis is exemplified by recourse to cultural consumption phenomena from the domains of cinematic discourse, computer-gaming, food and social gaming
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