Lotus flower
Lotus Artificial Life

Essays

Engineered Future - Engineered organisms are practically inevitable;
Evolution Sees! - Evolution is not blind;
New Species - On the character of new species;
One Big Organism - Will all life unite?
Nietzscheanism - On the Nietzscheans;
Specialised Humans - Human eusociality and castes;
Evolution is Good - Nature is not "wasteful, cruel and low";
Sex is Not a Disease - On the classification of recombination and disease;
Reviving Group Selection - Group selection's death may have been exaggerated;
Sex Favours Polyploidity - Recombination creates selection favouring polyploidity;
Gene Repair and Sex - Dysergetic epistasis and the gene repair theory of sex;
The Singularity is Nonsense - Criticism of Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near";
Intelligence Explosion - The intelligence explosion is happening now;
Technology Explosion - The ongoing explosion of technology;
Gender origin - Why males and females exist;
Gender division - Why few animals are hermaphrodites;
Levels of Selection - How many 'levels of selection' are there?
Against the singularity - What I really think about "the singularity";
The Real Founder Effect - Beyond the Founder Effect;
The Founder Selection Effect - Selection and the Founder Effect;
No Speed Limit For Evolution - Does evolution have a speed limit?
Genetic Drift and Population Size - Population size does affect the scale of genetic drift;
No Island Fossils - The lack of transitional fossils;
Whales are much smarter than humans - How smart whales are - in comparison with humans;
Against replicator terminology - Puoblems with formulations of evolution that build on the "replicator" idea;
Handicapped by sexual selection - Mate choice side effects - and what they might mean for the future;
Against whole brain emulation - Constructing intelligent machines via whole brain emulation;
Male variability - An evolutionary explanation for greater male variability;

Universal Darwinism

Universal Selection - Natural selection of non-living objects;
Universal Reproduction - On th ubiquity of copying processes in nature;
NanoDarwinism - Darwinism with fewer axioms;
Degenerative Darwinism - Darwinism without cumulative adaptations;
Informational Genetics - Genes as information;

Memetics

A New Kind of Evolution - Future evolution will be performed by intelligent agents;
Memetic Takeover - The new replicators triumph;
Synthetic Life Is Here Already -  New self-replicating agents are here, now;
New Organisms - Companies as organisms;
Misunderstood Memetics - Memetic misunderstandings;
More Memetic Misunderstandings - More memetic misunderstandings;
Misunderstandings Within Memetics - Misunderstandings from the ranks of the supporters;
My Memetic Misunderstandings - About my own issues with memetics;
Memetics: Death Report Exaggerated - Comments on the meme's premature obituary;
A New Kind of Evolution - Textbooks - Cultural evolution - what the textbooks say;
A New Kind of Evolution - Quotes - Cultural evolution - quotations on the topic;
Self-Directed Evolution - Universal cooperation;
Without Miracles reviewed - Comments on Gary Cziko's "Without Miracles";

Machine intelligence

How long before superintelligence? - When will we get superintelligent machines?
Intelligence Augmentation - Machine intelligence on a human foundation;
Angelic Foundations - Building angels;
Intelligent design vs random mutations - How does intelligent design stack up against GAs;
The Second Superintelligence - One superintelligence - or many?;
The Awakening Marketplace - Stockmarket AI;
Superintelligence - the driving problem - The path to superintelligent machines;
The Wirehead Problem - Superintelligence vs addiction;
On Parallelism -  Computer architecture: the path to a parallel world;
Ubiquitous digitalisation - On the progressive digitalisation of the world;
Evaluation under simulation - How evolution performs evaluations under simulation;
Self improving systems are here already - Companies and governments as SImpSs;
On general machine intelligence strategies - Will the path to superintelligent machines will be "broad" or "narrow";
The number of insights before superintelligence - Number of insights required to produce superintelligence;
Against strong AI - The term "Strong AI" - and why you should probably avoid using it;
How quickly will machine intelligence take off? - How quickly will machine intelligence "take off";
Will machines take our jobs? - Will the advent of intelligent machines make humans redundant;
Handicapped superintelligence - How utility functions of intelligent agents may affect their survival;
Stopping superintelligence - Superintelligent agents that don't object to being switched off;

Moved to http://matchingpennies.com/

On AIXI - On AIXI: a proposed model for synthetic intelligent agents;
The One True Razor - The optimality of Occam's razor;

Senescence

Universal Senescence - Senescence as a universal phenomenon;
Obsolescence - Senescence due to rapid change;
Future senescence - The future of the aging process;
Adaptive Senescence - Aging: disease - or the last developmental stage?
Parasite-driven senescence - How suckers kill the elderly faster;
Species Senescence - Are species somehow immune from senescence?

Tim Tyler | Contact | http://alife.co.uk/