Evolutionary Informatics
Investigating how information makes evolution possible
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— Cullen Schaffer[A] learner... that achieves at least mildly than better-than-chance performance, on average, ... is like a perpetual motion machine - conservation of generalization performance precludes it.
"A conservation law for generalization performance," in Proc. Eleventh International Conference on Machine Learning, H. Willian and W. Cohen. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1994, pp.295-265.
Evidence for the Design of Life: Part 4 — Variation Inducing Genetic Elements and their Function
Email: peterborger [at] hotmail [dot] comAbstract
Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are believed to be the selfish remnants of ancient RNA viruses that invaded the cells of organisms millions of years ago and now merely free-ride the genome in order to be replicated. This selfish gene thinking still dominates the public scene, but well-informed biologists know that the view among researchers is rapidly changing. Increasingly, ancient RNA viruses and their remnants are being thought of as having played (and still do) a significant role in protein evolution, gene structure, and transcriptional regulation. As argued in part 3 of this series of articles, ERVs may be the executors of genetic variation, and qualify as specifically designed variation-inducing genetic elements (VIGEs) responsible for variation in higher organisms. VIGEs induce variation by duplication, transposition, and may even rearrange chromosomes. This extraordinary claim requires extraordinary scientific support, which is present throughout this paper. In addition, the VIGE hypothesis may be a framework to understand the origin of diseases and explain rapid speciation events through facilitated chromosome swapping.
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