Natural Induction: Spontaneous Adaptive Organisation without Natural Selection.

Evolution by natural selection is believed to be the only possible source of spontaneous adaptive organisation in the natural world. This places strict limits on the kinds of systems that can exhibit adaptation spontaneously, i.e., without design. Physical systems can show some properties relevant to adaptation without natural selection or design. (1) The relaxation, or local energy minimisation, of a physical system constitutes a natural form of optimisation insomuch as it finds locally optimal solutions to the frustrated forces acting on it or between its components. (2) When internal structure 'gives way' or accommodates a pattern of forcing on a system, this constitutes learning insomuch, as it can store, recall, and generalise past configurations. Both these effects are quite natural and general, but in themselves insufficient to constitute non-trivial adaptation. However, here we show that the recurrent interaction of physical optimisation and physical learning together results in significant spontaneous adaptive organisation. We call this adaptation by natural induction. The effect occurs in dynamical systems described by a network of viscoelastic connections subject to occasional disturbances. When the internal structure of such a system accommodates slowly across many disturbances and relaxations, it spontaneously learns to preferentially visit solutions of increasingly greater quality (exceptionally low energy). We show that adaptation by natural induction thus produces network organisations that improve problem-solving competency with experience (without supervised training or system-level reward). We note that the conditions for adaptation by natural induction, and its adaptive competency, are different from those of natural selection. We therefore suggest that natural selection is not the only possible source of spontaneous adaptive organisation in the natural world.

Enlisting Probiotics to Combat Recurrent Urinary Tract Infections in Women-A Military Strategy for Meeting the Challenge.

For decades, the potential role of probiotics in the prevention and treatment of recurrent urinary tract infections has been extensively studied. However, achieving an effective problem-solving strategy has thus far proven elusive. Perhaps adopting a military paradigm might expedite our assault on chronic, recurring bacteriuria in women. What is needed is a targeted strategy with specific attention to (1) the enemy: the case-specific uropathogen; (2) the battlefield: the extraordinarily complex interplay of factors within the bladder, unique to a given patient, which interface with profoundly important influences from the gut biome, as well as the vaginal biota; (3) the weapon: an antimicrobial probiotic with demonstrated activity against that specific uropathogen; (4) a new strategy: taking these complexities into account, we posit a key role for the instillation of case-specific lactobacilli directly into the bladder of the designated patient. This newly proposed, targeted intervention might be termed "Probiotic Intravesical Organic Therapy-PIVOT"; and (5) the long campaign: reaching clinically proven success may entail a long campaign. However, already, on many fronts, the elements necessary for victory recently seem to be falling into place.

Development and selective grain make plasticity 'take the lead' in adaptive evolution.

BACKGROUND: Biological evolution exhibits an extraordinary capability to adapt organisms to their environments. The explanation for this often takes for granted that random genetic variation produces at least some beneficial phenotypic variation in which natural selection can act. Such genetic evolvability could itself be a product of evolution, but it is widely acknowledged that the immediate selective gains of evolvability are small on short timescales. So how do biological systems come to exhibit such extraordinary capacity to evolve? One suggestion is that adaptive phenotypic plasticity makes genetic evolution find adaptations faster. However, the need to explain the origin of adaptive plasticity puts genetic evolution back in the driving seat, and genetic evolvability remains unexplained. RESULTS: To better understand the interaction between plasticity and genetic evolvability, we simulate the evolution of phenotypes produced by gene-regulation network-based models of development. First, we show that the phenotypic variation resulting from genetic and environmental perturbation are highly concordant. This is because phenotypic variation, regardless of its cause, occurs within the relatively specific space of possibilities allowed by development. Second, we show that selection for genetic evolvability results in the evolution of adaptive plasticity and vice versa. This linkage is essentially symmetric but, unlike genetic evolvability, the selective gains of plasticity are often substantial on short, including within-lifetime, timescales. Accordingly, we show that selection for phenotypic plasticity can be effective in promoting the evolution of high genetic evolvability. CONCLUSIONS: Without overlooking the fact that adaptive plasticity is itself a product of genetic evolution, we show how past selection for plasticity can exercise a disproportionate effect on genetic evolvability and, in turn, influence the course of adaptive evolution.

How to fit in: The learning principles of cell differentiation.

Cell differentiation in multicellular organisms requires cells to respond to complex combinations of extracellular cues, such as morphogen concentrations. Some models of phenotypic plasticity conceptualise the response as a relatively simple function of a single environmental cues (e.g. a linear function of one cue), which facilitates rigorous analysis. Conversely, more mechanistic models such those implementing GRNs allows for a more general class of response functions but makes analysis more difficult. Therefore, a general theory describing how cells integrate multi-dimensional signals is lacking. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for understanding the relationships between environmental cues (inputs) and phenotypic responses (outputs) underlying cell plasticity. We describe the relationship between environment and cell phenotype using logical functions, making the evolution of cell plasticity equivalent to a simple categorisation learning task. This abstraction allows us to apply principles derived from learning theory to understand the evolution of multi-dimensional plasticity. Our results show that natural selection is capable of discovering adaptive forms of cell plasticity associated with complex logical functions. However, developmental dynamics cause simpler functions to evolve more readily than complex ones. By using conceptual tools derived from learning theory we show that this developmental bias can be interpreted as a learning bias in the acquisition of plasticity functions. Because of that bias, the evolution of plasticity enables cells, under some circumstances, to display appropriate plastic responses to environmental conditions that they have not experienced in their evolutionary past. This is possible when the selective environment mirrors the bias of the developmental dynamics favouring the acquisition of simple plasticity functions-an example of the necessary conditions for generalisation in learning systems. These results illustrate the functional parallelisms between learning in neural networks and the action of natural selection on environmentally sensitive gene regulatory networks. This offers a theoretical framework for the evolution of plastic responses that integrate information from multiple cues, a phenomenon that underpins the evolution of multicellularity and developmental robustness.

Developmental Bias and Evolution: A Regulatory Network Perspective.

Phenotypic variation is generated by the processes of development, with some variants arising more readily than others-a phenomenon known as "developmental bias." Developmental bias and natural selection have often been portrayed as alternative explanations, but this is a false dichotomy: developmental bias can evolve through natural selection, and bias and selection jointly influence phenotypic evolution. Here, we briefly review the evidence for developmental bias and illustrate how it is studied empirically. We describe recent theory on regulatory networks that explains why the influence of genetic and environmental perturbation on phenotypes is typically not uniform, and may even be biased toward adaptive phenotypic variation. We show how bias produced by developmental processes constitutes an evolving property able to impose direction on adaptive evolution and influence patterns of taxonomic and phenotypic diversity. Taking these considerations together, we argue that it is not sufficient to accommodate developmental bias into evolutionary theory merely as a constraint on evolutionary adaptation. The influence of natural selection in shaping developmental bias, and conversely, the influence of developmental bias in shaping subsequent opportunities for adaptation, requires mechanistic models of development to be expanded and incorporated into evolutionary theory. A regulatory network perspective on phenotypic evolution thus helps to integrate the generation of phenotypic variation with natural selection, leaving evolutionary biology better placed to explain how organisms adapt and diversify.

How evolution learns to generalise: Using the principles of learning theory to understand the evolution of developmental organisation.

One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments. Such variability is crucial for evolvability, but poorly understood. In particular, how can natural selection favour developmental organisations that facilitate adaptive evolution in previously unseen environments? Such a capacity suggests foresight that is incompatible with the short-sighted concept of natural selection. A potential resolution is provided by the idea that evolution may discover and exploit information not only about the particular phenotypes selected in the past, but their underlying structural regularities: new phenotypes, with the same underlying regularities, but novel particulars, may then be useful in new environments. If true, we still need to understand the conditions in which natural selection will discover such deep regularities rather than exploiting 'quick fixes' (i.e., fixes that provide adaptive phenotypes in the short term, but limit future evolvability). Here we argue that the ability of evolution to discover such regularities is formally analogous to learning principles, familiar in humans and machines, that enable generalisation from past experience. Conversely, natural selection that fails to enhance evolvability is directly analogous to the learning problem of over-fitting and the subsequent failure to generalise. We support the conclusion that evolving systems and learning systems are different instantiations of the same algorithmic principles by showing that existing results from the learning domain can be transferred to the evolution domain. Specifically, we show that conditions that alleviate over-fitting in learning systems successfully predict which biological conditions (e.g., environmental variation, regularity, noise or a pressure for developmental simplicity) enhance evolvability. This equivalence provides access to a well-developed theoretical framework from learning theory that enables a characterisation of the general conditions for the evolution of evolvability.

Evolutionary Connectionism: Algorithmic Principles Underlying the Evolution of Biological Organisation in Evo-Devo, Evo-Eco and Evolutionary Transitions.

The mechanisms of variation, selection and inheritance, on which evolution by natural selection depends, are not fixed over evolutionary time. Current evolutionary biology is increasingly focussed on understanding how the evolution of developmental organisations modifies the distribution of phenotypic variation, the evolution of ecological relationships modifies the selective environment, and the evolution of reproductive relationships modifies the heritability of the evolutionary unit. The major transitions in evolution, in particular, involve radical changes in developmental, ecological and reproductive organisations that instantiate variation, selection and inheritance at a higher level of biological organisation. However, current evolutionary theory is poorly equipped to describe how these organisations change over evolutionary time and especially how that results in adaptive complexes at successive scales of organisation (the key problem is that evolution is self-referential, i.e. the products of evolution change the parameters of the evolutionary process). Here we first reinterpret the central open questions in these domains from a perspective that emphasises the common underlying themes. We then synthesise the findings from a developing body of work that is building a new theoretical approach to these questions by converting well-understood theory and results from models of cognitive learning. Specifically, connectionist models of memory and learning demonstrate how simple incremental mechanisms, adjusting the relationships between individually-simple components, can produce organisations that exhibit complex system-level behaviours and improve the adaptive capabilities of the system. We use the term "evolutionary connectionism" to recognise that, by functionally equivalent processes, natural selection acting on the relationships within and between evolutionary entities can result in organisations that produce complex system-level behaviours in evolutionary systems and modify the adaptive capabilities of natural selection over time. We review the evidence supporting the functional equivalences between the domains of learning and of evolution, and discuss the potential for this to resolve conceptual problems in our understanding of the evolution of developmental, ecological and reproductive organisations and, in particular, the major evolutionary transitions.