Adaptation
05 May 1997 15:22
He marvelled at the fact that cats had two holes cut in their fur
at precisely the spot where their eyes were.
---G. C. Lichtenberg, Aphorisms G26
What, exactly, does it mean for something to "adapt"? What kinds of adapters
(adaptors?) are there, and how do they adapt? (
Darwin Machines are one sort;
Bernard Machines another.) How good are they at it?
How do they improve? Is it a good idea to make machines adapters? How about
buildings?
Recommended:
- W. Ross Ashby, Design for a
Brain
- Claude Bernard, Introduction to
the Study of Experimental Medicine
- Stewart Brand,
How Buildings Learn
- Charles Darwin, On the Origin of
Species [Try to get the first edition; Harvard publishes a fascimile
with an excellent introduction by Ernst Mayr.]
- Richard Dawkins
- The Selfish Gene
- The Extended Phenotype
- The Blind Watchmaker
- Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous
Idea
- T. H. Frazzetta, Complex Adaptations in Evolving
Populations [Has a certain ring to it, no? --- Thoughts on evading the
"what good is half a wing?" problem beloved of creationists]
- John Holland
- Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the
Artificial
- Gerd Sommerhoff, Analytical Biology [Attempts to
define adaptation rigorously. Highly suggestive and plausible, but he
perversely assumes determinism, and it's not obvious to me how to reformulate
his ideas stochastically.]
- D'Arcy Wentworth
Thompson, On Growth and Form
- Bruce Wallace and Adrian M. Srb, Adaptation
- George C. Willams, Adaptation and Natural Selection; a
Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought
To read:
- R. McNeill Alexander, Optima for Animals
- John R. Anderson, The Adaptive Character of Thought
- Rick Belew and Melanie Mitchell, Adaptive Individuals in
Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms
- Josh Bongard, Victor Zykov and Hod Lipson, "Resilient Machines
Through Continuous Self-Modeling", Science
314 (2006): 1118--1121
- Robert Brandon, Adaptation and Environment
- G. D. Hale Carpenter, Mimicry
- Michael Conrad, Adaptability: The Significance of Variability
from Molecule to Ecosystem
- Paul Sheldon Davies, Norms of Nature: Naturalism and the
Nature of Functions
- Rene D'Hulst and G. J. Rodgers, "Efficiency and persistence in
models of adaptation," cond-mat/0105189
- René Dubos
- So Human an Animal
- Man Adapting
- John Dupre (ed.), The Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution
and Optimality
- William FitzPatrick, Teleology and the Norms of Nature
- Verne Grant, The Origin of Adaptations
- Brian L. Keeley,
"Fixing content and function in neurobiological systems: The neuroethology of
electroreception", Biology and Philosophy 14:
395--430
[HTML
preprint]
- Merrell, The Adaptive Seascape
- Donald J. Ortner, How Humans Adapt: a Biocultural
Odyssey
- Jay Schulkin, Rethinking Homeostasis: Allostatic Regulation
in Physiology and Pathophysiology
- Jay Schulkin (ed.), Allostasis, Homeostasis and the Costs of
Physiological Adaptation
[Blurb]
- Eduardo D. Sontag
- J. E. R. Staddon, Adaptive Dynamics: The Theoretical Analysis
of Behavior [Blurb]
- Marc Toussaint, "Self-adaptive exploration in evolutionary
search," physics/0102009
- Andreas Wagner, Robustness and Evolvability in Living
Systems [Blurb,
chapter 1]
