idea
Natural selection is a process which retains at each generation only the fittest of system actors.
Natural selection works through several mechanisms:
- The introduction of variability of characteristics between generations[4].
- Competition for resources between actors.
- The elimination of actors with the lowest fit by absence of reproduction.
- The communication of desirable characteristics through reproduction of the fittest actors.
While it takes its root in evolution and biology, it is generally applicable to any system with resource constraints and mass effects that span over several generations, such as capitalism, governments, agile, and machine-learning
Natural selection is especially interesting to hypothesize on implicit rules of a system obtained through mutual evolution, based on observed characteristics. For example, a range of venomous insects such bees, hornets and wasps are striped [^3] to advertise that they are venomous. Their stripes are positive advantage: a char This came to be through mutual evolution: colorless insects came to be eaten because animals didn't notice their distinctive patterns, while animals came to die because they attacked bees unaware of the danger. At some point the pattern appeared for a strain of insects through variability, allowing to be noticed by some animals as dangerous. This also allowed their predators to mutually evolve and associate stripes = danger, the pattern spreading through many species[5].
Stripes are a positive advantage: a characteristic acquired by the species at some point which allows it to increase its reproductive success.
Reinforcement learning, and adversarial generative networks are both using natural selection functions to select the fittest models over a large number of generations.
links
Entropy is required to introduce variability in the system.
Agile is an example of natural selection applied to software, where only the ideas that fit are kept alive.
Lag and lead metrics is an evolutionary process where ideas that don't impact the lag metric are discarded.
Middle classes, and more generally the spread between upper and lower classes, is getting accentuated by natural selection in the capitalistic model (see card)
[4]: see note in Viruses. They are artifacts of natural selection.
Control in organizations is dictated by natural selection (see card).
references
[5]: On the origin of species, Charles Darwin. {todo: find my notes}
[Some caterpillars] are protected by a disagreeable taste or odour, it would be a positive advantage to them never to be mistaken for any of the palatable catterpillars [sic], because a slight wound such as would be caused by a peck of a bird’s bill almost always I believe kills a growing catterpillar. Any gaudy & conspicuous colour therefore, that would plainly distinguish them from the brown & green eatable catterpillars, would enable birds to recognise them easily as at a kind not fit for food, & thus they would escape seizure which is as bad as being eaten.
Darwin
Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, Miller, Alan S.; Satoshi Kanazawa presents evolutionary psychology: why we are cabled certain ways following natural selection, following reproductive success and survival.
{TODO: link with NEAT when written}
- [3]: Wiki / Aposematism (and see: Youtube / true facts about the nudibranch) is evolved characteristics advertising an animal's defense mechanisms, such as the color, sounds, or smell.