Evolving Lives: The Individual Historical Dimension in Evolution

Some benefits of a dialogue between evolutionary robotics and developmental ethology are presented with discussion of how developmental models might inform approaches to evolution. Notions of the importance of historical processes in adaptation are outlined and parallels between evolution and ontogeny as sources of change examined. Evolutionary robotics encompasses an extraordinary range of ideas and approaches. This paper is intended as an addition to the significant body of existing work which calls for consideration of ontogeny in evolution (e.g. [11, 7, 13, 12, 10, 9, 4].) The perspective presented here has two parts, the first is epistemological and concerns the descriptive dichotomies built into models of adaptive behaviour. The seond argues for explicit investigation of morphology and the role of changes in physical scale and proportion in adaptation. Although evolution is invoked as an explanation for developmental phenomena, the converse perspective is rarely explored. Dobz...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ECAL
• Authors: Rachel Wood
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental, ECAL 2001, Evolutionary Robotics, Historical Processes