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Identification of the selective forces that shaped adaptive phenotypes generally relies on current habitat and function, but these may differ from the context in which adaptations arose. Moreover, the fixation of adaptive change in a fluctuating environment and the mechanisms of long-term trends are still poorly understood, as is the role of behaviour in triggering these processes. Time series of fossils can provide evidence on these questions, but examples of individual lineages with adequate fossil and proxy data over extended periods are rare. Here, we present new data on proboscidean dental evolution in East Africa over the past 26 million years, tracking temporal patterns of morphological change in relation to proxy evidence of diet, vegetation and climate (aridity). We show that behavioural experimentation in diet is correlated with environmental context, and that major adaptive change in dental traits followed the changes in diet and environment but only after acquisition of functional innovations in the masticatory system. We partition traits by selective agent, showing that the acquisition of high, multiridged molars was primarily a response to an increase in open, arid environments with high dust accumulation, whereas enamel folding was more associated with the amount of grass in the diet. We further show that long-term trends in these features proceeded in a ratchet-like mode, alternating between directional change at times of high selective pressure and stasis when the selective regime reversed. This provides an explanation for morphology adapted to more extreme conditions than current usage (Liem's Paradox). Our study illustrates how, in fossil series with adequate stratigraphic control and proxy data, environmental and behavioural factors can be mapped on to time series of morphological change, illuminating the mode of acquisition of an adaptive complex., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

The advancement of science, as well as scientific careers, depends upon good and clear scientific writing. Science is the most democratic of human endeavours because, in principle, anyone can replicate a scientific discovery. In order for this to continue, writing must be clear enough to be understood well enough to allow replication, either in principle or in fact. In this paper I will present data on the publication process in Evolutionary Ecology, use it to illustrate some of the problems in scientific papers, make some general remarks about writing scientific papers, summarise two new paper categories in the journal which will fill gaps that appear to be expanding in the literature, and summarise new journal policies to help mitigate existing problems. Most of the suggestions about writing would apply to any scientific journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) are honored as the founders of modern evolutionary biology. Accordingly, much attention has focused on their relationship, from their independent development of the principle of natural selection to the receipt by Darwin of Wallace's essay from Ternate in the spring of 1858, and the subsequent reading of the Wallace and Darwin papers at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858. In the events of 1858 Wallace and Darwin are typically seen as central players, with Darwin's friends Charles Lyell (1797-1875) and Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) playing supporting roles. This narrative has resulted in an under-appreciation of a more central role for Charles Lyell as both Wallace's inspiration and foil. The extensive anti-transmutation arguments in Lyell's landmark Principles of Geology were taken as the definitive statement on the subject. Wallace, in his quest to solve the mystery of species origins, engaged with Lyell's arguments in his private field notebooks in a way that is concordant with his engagement with Lyell in the 1855 and 1858 papers. I show that Lyell was the object of Wallace's Sarawak Law and Ternate papers through a consideration of the circumstances that led Wallace to send his Ternate paper to Darwin, together with an analysis of the material that Wallace drew upon from the Principles. In this view Darwin was, ironically, intended for a supporting role in mediating Wallace's attempted dialog with Lyell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender system plays a supporting role in the process of information filtering. It plays a remarkable role in large-scale online shopping and product suggestions. This paper discusses various trends of recommender system such as content-based, collaborative-based and hybrid personalization techniques proposed for recommendations. It provides better insight and future directions of recommender systems. We have reviewed 142 articles from several journals and conference papers which were published from 1992 to 2019. We have used statistical descriptions to show the progression and drawbacks of the various notions of recommendation approaches. We have also discussed growing research demand in the area of recommender systems as well as the pros and cons of the currently available classifications. We have created a classification of recommender techniques, including various user inputs, knowledge from the database, the ways in which the recommendation will be presented to the user and the technologies which are used to create the recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The face is the most distinctive feature used to identify others. Modern humans have a short, retracted face beneath a large globular braincase that is distinctively different from that of our closest living relatives. The face is a skeletal complex formed by 14 individual bones that houses parts of the digestive, respiratory, visual and olfactory systems. A key to understanding the origin and evolution of the human face is analysis of the faces of extinct taxa in the hominin clade over the last 6 million years. Yet, as new fossils are recovered and the number of hominin species grows, the question of how and when the modern human face originated remains unclear. By examining key features of the facial skeleton, here we evaluate the evolutionary history of the modern human face in the context of its development, morphology and function, and suggest that its appearance is the result of a combination of biomechanical, physiological and social influences.

In the field of expensive optimization, numerous papers have proposed surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) for a few thousand or even hundreds of function evaluations. However, in reality, low-cost simulations suffice for a lot of real-world problems, in which the number of function evaluations is moderately restricted, e.g., to several thousands. In such moderately restricted scenario, SAEAs become unnecessarily time-consuming and tend to struggle with premature convergence. In addition, tuning the SAEA parameters becomes impractical under the restricted budgets of function evaluations—in some cases, inadequate configuration may degrade performance instead. In this context, this paper presents a fast and auto-tunable evolutionary algorithm for solving moderately restricted expensive optimization problems. The presented algorithm is a variant of adaptive differential evolution (DE) algorithms, and is called emulation-based adaptive DE or EBADE. The primary aim of EBADE is to emulate the principle of sample-efficient optimization, such as that in SAEAs, by adaptively tuning the DE parameter configurations. Specifically, similar to Expected Improvement-based sampling, EBADE identifies parameter configurations that may produce expected-to-improve solutions, without using function evaluations. Further, EBADE incepts a multi-population mechanism and assigns a parameter configuration to each subpopulation to estimate the effectiveness of parameter configurations with multiple samples carefully. This subpopulation-based adaptation can help improve the selection accuracy of promising parameter configurations, even when using an expected-to-improve indicator with high uncertainty, by validating with respect to multiple samples. The experimental results demonstrate that EBADE outperforms modern adaptive DEs and is highly competitive compared to SAEAs with a much shorter runtime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the celebration made by the Linnean Society of London for the 150 years anniversary since the reading of the seminal evolution papers by British naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace at one of the meetings of the organization in England in 1858. According to the article, the reading of the papers marks the removal of humanity from the center of creation to promote the concept of evolution that theorizes that life came into being by a process of natural selection.

In her paper, Janet Landa argues that the key behind the success of the ethnically homogeneous Chinese middleman group (EHMG) is their highly developed in-group cooperation. She places the EHMG phenomenon within the framework of evolutionary biology by calling it 'a cultural transmission unit' subject to the influence of both genes and culture. Landa suggests that the individual members of the EHMG comprise the units of selection for EHMG groups much like the genes comprise the units of selection for individual organisms. However, evolution occurs through the differential survival and reproduction of individual organisms. In order to meet the criteria of biological group selection, it would have to be demonstrated that groups in competition with EHMGs had gone extinct. The fact that the EHMGs are simply faring better than their competitors is not evidence for group selection. The other reason biological group selection is not really applicable to EHMGs is that there are no physical/biological barriers to exogamous mating, and cultural barriers are intrinsically unstable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Game theory describes social behaviors in humans and other biological organisms. By far, the most powerful tool available to game theorists is the concept of a Nash Equilibrium (NE), which is motivated by perfect rationality. NE specifies a strategy for everyone, such that no one would benefit by deviating unilaterally from his/her strategy. Another powerful tool available to game theorists are evolutionary dynamics (ED). Motivated by evolutionary and learning processes, ED specify changes in strategies over time in a population, such that more successful strategies typically become more frequent. A simple game that illustrates interesting ED is the generalized Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) game. The RPS game extends the children's game to situations where winning or losing can matter more or less relative to tying. Here we investigate experimentally three RPS games, where the NE is always to randomize with equal probability, but the evolutionary stability of this strategy changes. Consistent with the prediction of ED we find that aggregate behavior is far away from NE when it is evolutionarily unstable. Our findings add to the growing literature that demonstrates the predictive validity of ED in large-scale incentivized laboratory experiments with human subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the maximum speed at which biological evolution can occur. I derive inequalities that limit the rate of evolutionary processes driven by natural selection, mutations, or genetic drift. These rate limits link the variability in a population to evolutionary rates. In particular, high variances in the fitness of a population and of a quantitative trait allow for fast changes in the trait's average. In contrast, low variability makes a trait less susceptible to random changes due to genetic drift. The results in this article generalize Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection to dynamics that allow for mutations and genetic drift, via trade-off relations that constrain the evolutionary rates of arbitrary traits. The rate limits can be used to probe questions in various evolutionary biology and ecology settings. They apply, for instance, to trait dynamics within or across species or to the evolution of bacteria strains. They apply to any quantitative trait, e.g., from species' weights to the lengths of DNA strands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first microbial culture collection was established in 1890, and subsequently, over the course of the twentieth century, the number of culture collections grew substantially. One such collection was the CABI-IMI Genetic Resources Collection, informally initiated at the origins of the Commonwealth Mycological Institute in 1920 and established as a UK National Collection in 1947. Its holdings reflect the activities of CABI in agriculture and the environment. Like many collections, it was originally established as a taxonomic reference resource. Over the years, deposits have included strains isolated from disease outbreaks in major crops from all parts of the world. Recent developments in genome sequencing technology and bioinformatic analysis have opened up the potential to characterise historic strains to shed more insights on their biology and evolution. In this paper we describe how the resources held within the CABI-IMI culture collection have helped track the emergence and divergence of Fusarium xylarioides, the coffee wilt pathogen, with a specific focus on the evolution of pathogenicity. Such studies illustrate the value held within the world's culture collections—their importance in underpinning science and developing our understanding and evolution of plant diseases as well as how the impact of disease can be mitigated in response to climate change, in order to increase yields and feed the world's burgeoning population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits Fleeming Jenkin's anonymous review of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published in the North British Review in June 1867. This review is usually revered for its impact on Darwin's theory of descent with modification. Its classical interpretation states that Jenkin, a Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, made a compelling case against natural selection based on the fact of "blending inheritance" and the "swamping" of advantageous variations. Those themes, however, are strikingly absent from Jenkin's text. They were later read into Jenkin's text by scholars trying to explain how Darwinian selection was reconciled with Mendelian genes and the birth of the Modern Synthesis. While many scholars have tried to measure Jenkin's effect on Darwin, the value of the 1867 review remains unclear. This paper re-examines its content and concludes that Jenkin's "able review" was in fact written by an engineer whose competencies in biology were very low. Focusing on the figure of the shipwrecked white sailor isolated on an island inhabited by Black people, this paper also underlines the racial assumptions behind Jenkin's review. "Blending inheritance" is thus a theme linked to theoretical reworkings on the question of race and skin colors, taking its root in Galton's typology of heredity. Darwin was probably mostly unimpressed by Jenkin's review. The problems raised by the review were not so much "blending inheritance" and "swamping" but a conundrum of problems related to the effects of intercrossing on variation and reversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An equidistantX-cactus is a type of rooted, arc-weighted, directed acyclic graph with leaf set X, that is used in biology to represent the evolutionary history of a set X of species. In this paper, we introduce and investigate the space of equidistant X-cactuses. This space contains, as a subset, the space of ultrametric trees on X that was introduced by Gavryushkin and Drummond. We show that equidistant-cactus space is a CAT(0)-metric space which implies, for example, that there are unique geodesic paths between points. As a key step to proving this, we present a combinatorial result concerning ranked rooted X-cactuses. In particular, we show that such graphs can be encoded in terms of a pairwise compatibility condition arising from a poset of collections of pairs of subsets of X that satisfy certain set-theoretic properties. As a corollary, we also obtain an encoding of ranked, rooted X-trees in terms of partitions of X, which provides an alternative proof that the space of ultrametric trees on X is CAT(0). We expect that our results will provide the basis for novel ways to perform statistical analyses on collections of equidistant X-cactuses, as well as new directions for defining and understanding spaces of more general, arc-weighted phylogenetic networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method is described for determining the number of preferred codons in taxa in which G+C levels differ. If the hypothesis of random codon usage is not rejected, there are no preferred codons. If that hypothesis is rejected, then a model with one or two preferred codons is fitted to the data and a likelihood ratio test is used to determine whether there are one or two preferred codons. A C++ program is freely available to perform the calculations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health state assessment is an important measure to maintain the safety of aerospace relays. Due to the uncertainty within the relay system, the accuracy of the model assessment is challenged. In addition, the opaqueness of the process and incomprehensibility of the results tend to lose trust in the model, especially in high security fields, so it is crucial to maintain the interpretability of the model. Thus, this paper proposes a new interpretable belief rule base model with step-length convergence strategy (IBRB-Sc) for aerospace relay health state assessment. First, general interpretability criteria for BRB are considered, and strategies for maintaining model interpretability are designed. Second, the evidential reasoning (ER) method is used as the inference machine. Then, optimization is performed based on the Interpretable Projection Covariance Matrix Adaptive Evolution Strategy (IP-CMA-ES). Finally, the validity of the model is verified using the JRC-7M aerospace relay as a case study. Comparative experiments show that the proposed model maintains high accuracy and achieves advantages in interpretability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which domains of biology do philosophers of biology primarily study? The fact that philosophy of biology has been dominated by an interest for evolutionary biology is widely admitted, but it has not been strictly demonstrated. Here I analyse the topics of all the papers published in Biology & Philosophy, just as the journal celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. I then compare the distribution of biological topics in Biology & Philosophy with that of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA, focusing on the recent period 2003-2015. This comparison reveals a significant mismatch between the distributions of these topics. I examine plausible explanations for that mismatch. Finally, I argue that many biological topics underrepresented in philosophy of biology raise important philosophical issues and should therefore play a more central role in future philosophy of biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the publication of a research paper that argues in favor of intelligent design in the "Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington" in the U.S. Impact of the publication of the paper on the advocacy of getting intelligent design into the curriculum; Use of information theory and other techniques to argue that the complexity of living organisms cannot be explained by Darwinian evolution; Overview of the arguments of Stephen Meyer, the author of the paper.

Discusses the discovery of the chimp teeth from the Kapthurin Formation in the East African Rift Valley. Significance of the discovery because there is no fossils of modern apes had ever been found in Africa; Findings in the paper co-authored by Sally McBrearty, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, and Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences; Discovery of the first chimp tooth by Jablonski from a collection of monkey fossils amassed by McBrearty from Kapthurin Formation; Implications for evolution and anthropology; Irony in the discovery of the teeth.

To improve the quality and efficiency of machine translation (MT) for low-resource languages (LRLs), this paper analyzes the application of genetic algorithm (GA) under the background of cloud computing (CC). By using GA to optimize MT for LRL, this study aims to address the limitations and challenges of traditional methods on LRL. Firstly, GA under the background of the CC platform is analyzed in detail. The CC platform offers powerful computing and storage capabilities that provide the basis for large-scale optimization using GA. GA is an optimization algorithm based on the principle of biological evolution, which seeks the optimal solution by simulating genes' genetic and evolutionary processes. In MT of LRL, GA can be used to optimize model parameters, select translation rules, and improve translation quality, thereby improving translation results. Secondly, the present situation of MT for LRL is described. Finally, the traditional LRL-oriented MT and the GA-optimized LRL-oriented MT are compared and analyzed. The results reveal that the traditional LRL-oriented MT has low accuracy and low customer satisfaction (CS). Considering the translation time, accuracy, and resource utilization rate (RUR), the highest rate is only about 47%. In contrast, GA-optimized LRL-oriented MT significantly improves translation accuracy and CS, reaching approximately 94%. The final evaluation results indicate that the accuracy of the model is usually above 70%, and up to 94%. Therefore, GA plays an important role in optimization for LRL-oriented MT. This paper provides technical support for optimizing LRL-oriented MT and contributes to the further development of MT technology. By applying GA, the limitations of traditional methods in LRL can be overcome and the quality and efficiency of translation can be improved. It is of great significance to improve the development of translation technology of LRL, enhance cross-language communication, and promote global cultural exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differential evolution (DE) is one of the most efficient evolution algorithms (ES) for dealing with nonlinear, complicated and difficult global optimization problems. The main contribution of this paper can be summarized in three directions: Firstly, a novel crossover rate (CR) generation scheme based on the zscore value of fitness, named fcr, is introduced. For a minimization problem, the proposed CR generation strategy always assigns a smaller CR value to individual with smaller fitness value. Therefore, the parameters of individuals with better fitness are inherited by their offspring with high probability. In the second direction, the control parameters are adjusted by unused bimodal settings in which each parameter setting is selected according to the evolution status of individual. The third direction of our work is introducing the L1 norm distance as the weights for updating the mean value of crossover rate and scale factor. Theoretically, compared with L2 norm, L1-norm is more efficient to suppress outliers in the difference vector. These modifications are first integrated with the mutation strategy of JADE, then a modified version, named JADEfcr, is proposed. In addition, to improve the optimization ability further, another variant LJADEfcr by using a linear population reduction mechanism is considered. So as to confirm and examine the performance of JADEfcr and LJADEfcr, numerical experiments are conducted on 29 optimization problems defined by CEC2017 benchmark. For JADEfcr, its experimental results are made a comparison with twelve state-of-the-art algorithms. The comparative study demonstrates that in terms of robustness, stability and solution quality, JADEfcr are better and highly competitive with these well-known algorithms. For LJADEfcr, its results are compared with JADEfcr and other nine powerful algorithms including four recent algorithms and five top algorithms on CEC2017 competition. Experimental results indicate that LJADEfcr is superior and statistically competitive with these excellent algorithms in terms of robustness, stability and the quality of the obtained solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the joint replenishment and delivery problem taking trade credits the delay in payment permitted by suppliers and capacity-constrained into consideration (CJRD-TC). The CJRD-TC aims to minimize the total system costs by finding a reasonable replenishment and delivery schedule policy. In this paper, an opposite-based RUNge Kutta optimization algorithm (OBRUN) is proposed to compare with other intelligent algorithms, including the differential evolution (DE), RUNge Kutta optimization algorithm (RUN), sine cosine algorithm (SCA), and adaptive differential evolution with optimal external archive (JADE). The proposed algorithm is tested on 14 optimization functions. The values of average, standard deviation, and the best are the lowest for 12 functions, which demonstrates OBRUN is superior to other algorithms. We also provide graphs of search history, 2D views of functions, trajectory curve, average fitness history, and convergence curve of OBRUN, the balance between exploration and exploitation over the course of iterations can be observed. The convergence curves of five algorithms are also depicted, which show OBRUN has a fast convergence rate and accuracy than other algorithms. We conduct numerical experiments, parameter tuning, and sensitivity analysis for each of the small-scale, medium-scale, and large-scale number of items. The OBRUN can always find better solutions with the lowest mean values and the best-found total cost results than other algorithms. Indicators of the average optimality gap and the optimality gap dominate by the value of zero. These computational results have demonstrated OBRUN is a suitable and effective candidate for managers to solve the practical CJRD-TC problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of this paper discusses the theme of the "simulated body", that is the sense of "being there" in a body that is not one's own, or that does not exist in the way one perceives it. He addresses this issue by comparing Immersive Virtual Reality technology, the phenomenological approach, and Gerald Edelman's theory of Neural Darwinism. Virtual Reality has been used to throw light on some phenomena that cannot be studied experimentally in real life, and the results of its simulations enrich the phenomenological discourse on the lived body. Virtual "Reality" seems to replicate—at least in part—the simulation mechanisms of our mind, thus favoring developments in the field of philosophy of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the history of evolutionary thought, it has often been said that ideas on the transformation of species found in the work of Erasmus Darwin, principally as set forth in his The Temple of Nature (1803), inspired his grandson's theory of evolution. However, little historical evidence has been produced to back up this claim. Based on a physical examination of Charles Darwin's own copy of The Temple of Nature, this paper presents the 25 markings Darwin made in the book as evidence of his interest in and familiarity with Erasmus Darwin's ideas on the change over time across species. This finding contradicts previous statements reporting only two annotations, which suggested he had little to no interest in the book. This paper purposes that Charles Darwin's annotations indicate his and his grandfather's shared interest in the competition for reproduction (sexual selection) and point to a more remarkable resemblance between Erasmus Darwin's The Temple of Nature and Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871) rather than to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection (The Origin of Species), to which Erasmus's ideas are more often compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the protein evolution study conducted by researchers Nobuhiko Tokuriki and Dan Tawfik at the Weismann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. It mentions about the work of Brian Shoichet and his colleagues which gave idea on Tawfik about chaperone proteins and states that Tokuriki joined into the laboratory just as the idea is taking shape. It offers information on their work in testing the ability GroEL/GroES chaperone protein in directed evolution.

The article discusses the discovery of a fossil within Canada's Devon Island that provides a link in the evolution of pinniped ancestry. It was discovered by undergraduate researcher Elizabeth Ross while traveling with a palaeontology filed crew. The crew was headed by Canadian Museum of Nature palaeobiologist Natalia Rybczynski, who provides quotes.

The article is about the non-coding DNA that distinguishes us from other mammals. David Haussler, a bioinformatician, and others researched on the non-coding regions for accelerated evolution of human genome. They found that the Human accelerated region 1 (Har1), found only in the humans, and the Har1 encodes a structural RNA. This research concluded that the Har1 regions are responsible for the brain development, and differentiate us from primates and mammals.

The disagreement between Binmore and the 'behaviouralists' concerns mainly the kind of reciprocity mechanisms that sustain cooperation in and out of the experimental laboratory. Although Binmore's scepticism concerning Strong Reciprocity is justified, his case for Weak Reciprocity and the long-run convergence to Nash equilibria is unsupported by laboratory evidence. Part of the reason is that laboratory evidence alone cannot solve the reciprocity controversy, and researchers should pay more attention to field data. As an example, I briefly illustrate a historical case suggesting that the institutions that foster cooperation in the real world rely on Weak Reciprocity mechanisms such as those that feature prominently in Binmore's story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language is a complex evolving system and it is not a trivial task to model the dynamics of processes occurring during its evolution. Therefore, modeling language evolution has attracted the interest of several researchers giving rise to a lot of models in the literature of the last millennium. This work reviews the literature devoted to computationally represent the evolution of human language through formal models and provides an analysis of the bibliographic production and scientific impact of the surveyed language evolution models to give some conclusions about current trends and future perspectives of this research field. The survey provides also an overview of the strategies for validating and comparing the different language evolution models and how these techniques have been applied by the surveyed models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While French biologists were turning a cold shoulder to On the Origin of Species in the 1860s, Charles Darwin was earnestly pursuing a professional connection with one French physiologist in particular: Charles Brown-Séquard. Darwin had been closely following Brown-Séquard's startling experiments on guinea pigs, which demonstrated that experimentally induced epilepsy could pass from parent to offspring. In Darwin's mind, Brown-Séquard had produced the most convincing evidence to date that acquired traits could be inherited. Darwin saw opportunities in Brown-Séquard and his work. If Brown-Séquard realized the evolutionary implications of his experiments, and then endorsed the Origin in Paris, Darwin could be well on his way to securing a French audience for his theories. Darwin quickly mobilized his powers of correspondence to make this French connection, but Brown-Séquard received Darwin's advances with caution. A connection with Darwin could be useful in London and America, where he was increasingly spending time, but to publicly support Darwin would be professionally damaging back home in Paris. This paper examines the dance of letters between Darwin and Brown-Séquard, the politics of citation, and the delicacy of sustaining a transnational biological career between France and Britain in the 1860s. This paper casts a new perspective on an old debate in the history of biology. I show that from within the "heavy cloud" of anti-evolutionary thought in France (Stebbins 1988), there existed a live wire between Brown-Séquard and Darwin. I argue that British evolutionary theory in the age of Darwin was built, in part, with French participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The width spread is one of the key indices affecting hot rolling processes and product quality. The traditional Shibahara spread prediction model (SSM) does not take into account the wear and interference of production equipment. As a result, the prediction accuracy cannot satisfy the high precision and high reliability requirements. To improve the prediction accuracy, first, this paper analyzes the strip deformation mechanism and the source of prediction errors and proposes an improved Shibahara spread model (ISSM) based on wear and interference. Second, a Bayesian-optimized differential evolution and adaptive gradient descent (BDE-AGD) algorithm is proposed for ISSM parameter optimization. This algorithm adopts the Bayesian algorithm to optimize the differential evolution (BDE) algorithm in stage 1, which improves the global search ability. Furthermore, the adaptive strategy is used for gradient descent (AGD) to improve the local search capability in stage 2. Finally, the experimental results show that the BDE-AGD algorithm reduces the error by 21.9% and 3.1% compared with DE-AGD and BDE-GD, respectively. This shows that BDE-AGD has a better global optimization capability. In addition, the prediction precision of ISSM is improved by 9.77% compared with the traditional SSM. Moreover, the precision of ISSM is improved by 8.56% on average compared with seven machine learning algorithms. This shows that ISSM optimized by BDE-AGD can achieve high-precision prediction of strip spread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The architecture design and multi-scale learning principles of the human brain that evolved over hundreds of millions of years are crucial to realizing human-like intelligence. Spiking neural network based Liquid State Machine (LSM) serves as a suitable architecture to study brain-inspired intelligence because of its brain-inspired structure and the potential for integrating multiple biological principles. Existing researches on LSM focus on different certain perspectives, including high-dimensional encoding or optimization of the liquid layer, network architecture search, and application to hardware devices. There is still a lack of in-depth inspiration from the learning and structural evolution mechanism of the brain. Considering these limitations, this paper presents a novel LSM learning model that integrates adaptive structural evolution and multi-scale biological learning rules. For structural evolution, an adaptive evolvable LSM model is developed to optimize the neural architecture design of liquid layer with separation property. For brain-inspired learning of LSM, we propose a dopamine-modulated Bienenstock-Cooper-Munros (DA-BCM) method that incorporates global long-term dopamine regulation and local trace-based BCM synaptic plasticity. Comparative experimental results on different decision-making tasks show that introducing structural evolution of the liquid layer, and the DA-BCM regulation of the liquid layer and the readout layer could improve the decision-making ability of LSM and flexibly adapt to rule reversal. This work is committed to exploring how evolution can help to design more appropriate network architectures and how multi-scale neuroplasticity principles coordinated to enable the optimization and learning of LSMs for relatively complex decision-making tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well recognized that human societies and their problem-solving capabilities have evolved much faster than biological evolution. The inspiration from human behaviors, knowledge exchange, and transformation has given rise to a new evolutionary computation paradigm. Multiple research endeavors have been reported in the literature inspired by the diverse aspects of human societies with corresponding terminologies to describe the algorithm. These endeavors have resulted in piles of algorithms, worded differently but with more or less similar underlying mechanisms causing immense confusion for a new reader. This paper presents a generalized framework for these socio-inspired evolutionary algorithms (SIEAs) or socio-inspired meta-heuristic algorithms. A survey of various SIEAs is provided to highlight the working of these algorithms on a common framework, their variations and improved versions proposed in the literature, and their applications in various fields of search and optimization. The algorithmic description and the comparison of each SIEA with the general framework enable a clearer understanding of the similarities and differences between these methodologies. Efforts have been made to provide an extensive list of references with due context. This paper could become an excellent reference as a starting point for anyone interested in this fascinating field of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid growth and high carbon-fixation properties make microalgal biomass a preferred source of energy-production technologies, particularly biodiesel and bioethanol, as well as nutritional supplements and pharmaceuticals. Today, microalgal biofuel technology, which is continuing to be developed as a surrogate for fossil-fuel technology, is the focus of constant research and development, especially regarding biomass yield and lipid production. Single stressors on microalgae have been commonly examined for efficient biofuel production; however, the synergetic effects of stressors on the lipid and biomass productivity of microalgae might lead to enhanced lipid properties. In addition, considering more than one parameter might be time-consuming; thus, many models, such as the surface-response methodology, can enable significant optimization of microalgal productivity economically. As well as multiple stressors, adaptive stressors considered in "adaptive laboratory evolution" could provide robust strains that alter low lipid yields. Although the field has progressed substantially in recent years, much about microalgae, their biological potential, how to efficiently utilize them, and their metabolic responses to various stressors remain unknown. Using an extensive review of recent developments in single-stress strategies, combined-stress strategies, and adaptive stress strategies, this paper gives an overview of recent developments in microalgal biofuel production under stress conditions. Further, it has also been suggested that an integrated microalgal biorefinery that also produces high-value chemicals alongside biofuel might significantly enhance its economic feasibility. It is expected that this document will provide an understanding of how to develop commercially viable microalgae strains for biofuel applications, taking several types of stress into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social and economic sciences are grounded on the basic assumption that social life, decision-making behavior, and consciousness are classical physical and therefore material phenomena. Quantum social science, a new research area, which refers to the knowledge and interpretations of quantum physics, is challenging this assumption. This paper gives an overview of quantum social science and explains quantum decision theory on the one hand with a focus on the cognitive biases first elaborated by Kahneman & Tversky, and on the other hand by Darwin´s theory of evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The catalytic oxidation of CO by O2 to form CO2 over Pt based catalysis is one of the most studied catalytic reaction leading to controversial mechanism descriptions. Steady State Isotopic Transient Kinetic Analysis (SSITKA) coupled with InfraRed (IR) spectroscopy is a powerful technique to study heterogeneous reaction mechanisms combining both the observation of adsorbed species on the catalyst surface and kinetic measurements. In this paper, SSITKA-IR technique was applied to study the CO oxidation reaction in presence and absence of CO2 in order to distinguish between active and spectator intermediates formed during the reaction. Linear carbonyl and bridged carbonyl type species adsorbed on metallic Pt0 were clearly identified as active intermediates at low temperature (131 °C). In contrast, the hydrogen-carbonate species formed during CO oxidation reaction were proven to be inactive species in CO2 formation but rather due to the re-adsorption of CO2 product itself on alumina surface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past quarter-century has witnessed a revolution in our understanding of the phylogenetics, systematics, and ecology of pteridophytes (ferns and lycophytes), particularly due to the rapid accumulation of plastid sequence data and a renewed interest in the ecology of the sexual phase of the life cycle. We here compile 19 papers recently published in the Journal of Plant Research dealing with the biology of pteridophytes, grouped into six categories: (1) breeding systems, (2) species complexes and polyploidization, (3) fossil taxa, (4) gametophyte ecology, (5) systematics, (6) biodiversity. We hope this collection of papers will be of value to researchers interested in this fascinating group of plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that the German morphological tradition made a major contribution to twentieth-century study of form. Several scientists paved the way for this research: paleontologist Adolf Seilacher (1925–2014), entomologist Hermann Weber (1899–1956), and biologist Johann-Gerhard Helmcke (1908–1993) together with architect Frei Otto (1925–2015). All of them sought to examine morphogenetic processes to illustrate their inherent structural properties, thus challenging the neo-Darwinian framework of evolutionary theory. I point out that the German theoretical challenge to adaptationist thinking was possible through an exchange and transfer of practices, data, technologies, and knowledge between biologically oriented students of form and architects, designers, and engineers. This exchange of practices and knowledge was facilitated by the establishment of two collaborative research centers at the beginning of the 1970s. Hence, by showing the richness of topics, methods, and technologies discussed in German-speaking morphology between 1950 and the 1970s, this paper paves the way to a much broader comprehension of the shifts that have shaped twentieth-century evolutionary biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the twentieth century Haeckel's biogenetic law was widely questioned. On the one hand, there were those who wanted to dismiss it altogether: ontogeny and phylogeny did not have any systematic or interesting relation. On the other hand, there were those who sought to revise it. They argued that while Haeckel's recapitulationism might have been erroneous, this should not deter the research over the relation between evolution and development. The British embryologist Walter Garstang was one of the main figures on the "revisionists" side. In this paper, I first situate Garstang's contribution to embryology and evolution within the extraordinarily creative period of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Then, I review some of Garstang's specific ideas in detail, especially his most well-known 1922 paper "The Theory of Recapitulation." Finally, I look at how the demise of the biogenetic law in light of Garstang's views—as well as from the perspective of contemporary developmental evolution—should be understood. My main concern is not about the dismissal of Haeckel's law or the sidelining of embryology in the twentieth-century evolutionary biology. I am rather interested in exploring why Garstang's revised version of biogenetic law—which was entirely consistent with the neo-Darwinian perspective underpinning the Modern synthesis—did not spur a major new agenda in evolutionary biology after the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The variation of the network topology directly indicates the knowledge network evolution, the principal composition of which is the structural evolution. Based on the principles of both the minimum coupling costs between knowledge subjects and the network average value threshold, this paper constructs the evolution model of a small-world knowledge network. Using MATLAB programming, this paper analyzes the characteristics of the evolution of knowledge network. It then examines the main parameter changes and the distribution of the network node degree as well as its probability distribution and then proceeds to investigate the variation of the subjects' knowledge level as well as the variation speed. The simulation results show that with the structural evolution of the knowledge network, the connection between the network subjects has been improved after numerous rewiring. Compared with the initial state, the total knowledge stock of the knowledge network and the average knowledge stock of the subjects are significantly enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent publication in Nature has generated much heated discussion about evolution, its tendency towards increasing diversity and complexity, and its potential status above and beyond the known laws of fundamental physics. The argument at the heart of this controversy concerns assembly theory, a method to detect and quantify the influence of higher-level emergent causal constraints in computational worlds made of basic objects and their combinations. In this short essay, I briefly review the theory, its basic principles and potential applications. I then go on to critically examine its authors' assertions, concluding that assembly theory has merit but is not nearly as novel or revolutionary as claimed. It certainly does not provide any new explanation of biological evolution or natural selection, or a new grounding of biology in physics. In this regard, the presentation of the paper is starkly distorted by hype, which may explain some of the outrage it created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combined heat and power economic emission dispatch (CHPEED) can obtain good economic and environmental benefits, but the dispatch problem presents non-convex, nonlinear, multi-constrained and multi-objective characteristics. Thus, a two-stage cooperative multi-objective differential evolutionary algorithm (TCADEA) is proposed in this paper. The algorithm uses a two-stage framework: the first stage uses a two-population strategy to divide the population into an elite population and an ordinary population, where the elite population is used to obtain better target values and the ordinary population is used to search the target space to ensure the diversity of the population and update the two populations by different adaptive differential operators. In addition, the ε constraint processing technique is used to handle the constraints. The second stage combines two populations into one and generates offspring through the constrained dominance principle (CDP) and adaptive differential evolution to maintain well-distributed population. The actual case results show that the TCADEA algorithm reduces $0.034 × 106, $0.008 × 106, $0.07 × 106 and 113 × 105 lb, 102 × 105 lb, 155 × 105 lb in fuel cost and emissions compared to MODE, NSGA-II, and TOP, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of evolution to understand biology, there is significant evidence that many biology teachers have difficulties to successfully teach this topic. The purpose of this study is to describe procedures by which a paper-and-pencil instrument to assess teachers' pedagogical content knowledge for evolution (PCKevo) was developed and validated. The instrument was created to measure the components proposed in the model of Magnusson et al. (1999), except for the orientations. The creation of the questionnaire was carried out through eleven steps: (1) conceptualization, (2–4) creation of items and rubric reviewed by experts (focus on content and construct validity), (5–7) piloting a 32-item questionnaire to 10 biology teachers (focus on face and construct validity and reliability), (8–10) piloting a 16-item questionnaire to 61 biology teachers (focus on discriminant and construct validity and reliability), (11) application of a different instrument (CoRe interview) to four teachers (focus on criterion validity). The final version of the questionnaire (which includes three PCK components) showed in a Rasch analysis for the reliability of the items (α = 0.90) and persons (α = 0.81) adequate values. When applying the final version of the questionnaire, there is also evidence of discriminant validity (differences between two groups of teachers with or without professional development in evolution education). The contributions of the PCKevo instrument for research topics and evolution teaching are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This series of papers is intended to evaluate astrocladistics in reconstructing phylogenies of galaxies. The objective of this second paper is to formalize the concept of galaxy formation and to identify the processes of diversification. We show that galaxy diversity can be expected to organize itself in a hierarchy. In order to better understand the role of mergers, we have selected a sample of 43 galaxies from the GALICS database built from simulations with a hybrid model for galaxy formation studies. These simulated galaxies, described by 119 characters and considered as representing still undefined classes, have experienced different numbers of merger events during evolution. Our cladistic analysis yields a robust tree that proves the existence of a hierarchy. Mergers, like interactions (not taken into account in the GALICS simulations), are probably a strong driver for galaxy diversification. Our result shows that mergers participate in a branching type of evolution, but do not seem to play the role of an evolutionary clock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julian Huxley's eclipse of Darwinism narrative has cast a long shadow over the historiography of evolutionary theory around the turn of the nineteenth century. It has done so by limiting who could be thought of as Darwinian. Peter Bowler used the eclipse to draw attention to previously understudied alternatives to Darwinism, but maintained the same flaw. In his research on the Non-Darwinian Revolution, he extended this problematic element even further back in time. This paper explores how late nineteenth-century neo-Darwinian conceptualizations of Darwinism were later utilized by several advocates and detractors of the Modern Synthesis. John Beatty has shown how this continuity hinges at least partly on the perceived importance of the creativity of natural selection. The paper provides a more thorough look at Darwin's two conflicting accounts of variation, ascribed to struggles in explaining quantitative versus qualitative characters. In doing so, it suggests that other forms of Darwinism persisted, in both the non-Darwinian revolution and eclipse periods, because of tension between contingency and creativity in Darwin's own work. This tension is traced out from Darwin's conceptions of variation into the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, Hugo de Vries, and Thomas Henry Huxley. Based on this, the eclipse narrative is criticized for not considering the meaning of Darwinism in different geographical locations. Britain and the United States showed few signs of an eclipse. Rather, the rise of German debates about Haeckel's vision of Darwinism have been mistaken for a universal decline in support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]