Skip to main content
Log in

A Reply to this article was published on 19 November 2013

The Original Article was published on 21 August 2013

Abstract

Wolfgang Banzhaf’s essay elegantly shows how emergence can be observed within the genetic programming (GP) framework. His work provides inspiration to employ GP for investigating emerging phenomena in biological evolution. This commentary attempts to further stimulate such development towards a more realistic GP framework by incorporating features observed in natural evolution. The examples discussed are multiscalarity, lower-level stochasticity, and co-evolution of repair or protection mechanisms.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. As Corning [2] points out, there are various forms of synergy. For him, emergent phenomena are rather a subset of synergistic effects and, by following Lewes (see Ref. [25] in [1]), he suggests limiting the term ‘emergence’ further to cases where “wholes […] are composed of things of unlike kind” and their cooperative interactions yield qualitatively novel effects, often through “division of labor”. The synergistic effects observed in GP can still be classified as emergent according to this rather vague definition.

References

  1. W. Banzhaf, Genetic programming and emergence. Genet. Program. Evol. Mach. (2013) (this issue)

  2. P.A. Corning, The re-emergence of “emergence”: A venerable concept in search of a theory. Complexity 7(6) (2002)

  3. T. Gregor, K. Fujimoto, N. Masaki, S. Sawai, The onset of collective behavior in social amoebae. Science 328(5981), 1021–1025 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. I. Martincorena, A.S.N. Seshasayee, N.M. Luscombe, Evidence of non-random mutation rates suggests an evolutionary risk management strategy. Nature 485(7396), 95–98 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to André Leier.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Leier, A. Emergence in simulated evolution. Genet Program Evolvable Mach 15, 79–81 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-013-9201-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-013-9201-1

Keywords

Navigation