Eörs Szathmáry

• Ph.D., D.Sc.
• Research Director at Parmenides Foundation

Building on the algorithmic equivalence between finite population replicator dynamics and particle filtering based approximation of Bayesian inference, we design a computational model to demonstrate the emergence of Darwinian evolution over representational units when collectives of units are selected to infer statistics of high-dimensional combina...

Biological reproduction rests ultimately on chemical autocatalysis. Autocatalytic chemical cycles are thought to have played an important role in the chemical complexification en route to life. There are two, related issues: what chemical transformations allow such cycles to form, and at what speed they are operating. Here we investigate the latter...

The RNA world hypothesis proposes that during the early evolution of life, primordial genomes of the first self-propagating evolutionary units existed in the form of RNA-like polymers. Autonomous, non-enzymatic, and sustained replication of such information carriers presents a problem, because product formation and hybridization between template an...

The RNA world hypothesis proposes that during the early evolution of life, primordial genomes of the first self-propagating evolutionary units existed in the form of RNA-like polymers. Autonomous, non-enzymatic and sustained replication of such information carriers presents a problem, because product formation and hybridization between template and...

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) fulfill the essential function of maintaining the stability of cellular differentiation states by sustaining lineage-specific gene expression, while driving the progression of development. However, accounting for the relative stability of intermediate differentiation stages and their divergent trajectories remains a...

We propose that the global environmental crises of the Anthropocene are the outcome of a ratcheting process in long-term human evolution which has favoured groups of increased size and greater environmental exploitation. To explore this hypothesis, we review the changes in the human ecological niche. Evidence indicates the growth of the human niche...

The RNA world hypothesis proposes that during the early evolution of life, primordial genomes of the first self-propagating evolutionary units existed in the form of RNA-like polymers. Autonomous, non-enzymatic and sustained replication of such information carriers presents a problem, because product formation and mutual hybridization between templ...

Living organisms are astonishingly complex. And the more we know about them - their biochemistry, their anatomy, their behaviour - the more astonishing are the detailed adaptations that we discover. How could this complexity have arisen? Most of us are familiar with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. The idea behind it being that, i...

Background Conventional wisdom in evolutionary theory considers aging as a non-selected byproduct of natural selection. Based on this, conviction aging was regarded as an inevitable phenomenon. It was also thought that in the wild organisms tend to die from diseases, predation and other accidents before they could reach the time when senescence tak...

Sustained autocatalysis coupled to compartment growth and division is a key step in the origin of life, but an experimental demonstration of this phenomenon in an artificial system has previously proven elusive. We show that autocatalytic reactions within compartments—when autocatalysis, and reactant and solvent exchange outpace product exchange—dr...

The emergence of self-replication in chemical space has led to an explosive diversification of form and function. It is hypothesized that a similar process underlies human action selection in complex combinatorial spaces, such as the space of simulated action sequences. Furthermore, the spontaneous appearance of a non-predesigned evolutionary searc...

Insight problems are particularly interesting, because problems which require restructuring allow researchers to investigate the underpinnings of the Aha-experience, creativity and out of the box thinking. There is a need for new insight tasks to probe and extend the limits of existing theories and cognitive frameworks. To shed more light on this f...

Human societies are no doubt complex. They are characterized by division of labour, multiple hierarchies, intricate communication networks and transport systems. These phenomena and others have led scholars to propose that human society may be, or may become, a new hierarchical level that may dominate the individual humans within it, similar to the...

A dynamic model and an agent-based simulation model implementing the assumptions of the confrontational scavenging hypothesis on early protolanguage as an adaptive response of Homo erectus to gradual change in their habitat has been developed and studied. The core assumptions of the hypothesis and the model scenario are the pre-adaptation of our an...

Bayesian learning theory and evolutionary theory both formalize adaptive competition dynamics in possibly high‐dimensional, varying, and noisy environments. What do they have in common and how do they differ? In this paper, we discuss structural and dynamical analogies and their limits, both at a computational and an algorithmic‐mechanical level. W...

Efficient search in vast combinatorial spaces, such as those of possible action sequences, linguistic structures, or causal explanations, is an essential component of intelligence. Is there any computational domain that is flexible enough to provide solutions to such diverse problems and can be robustly implemented over neural substrates? Based on...

There is increased awareness of the possibility of developmental memories resulting from evolutionary learning. Genetic regulatory and neural networks can be modelled by analogous formalism raising the important question of productive analogies in principles, processes and performance. We investigate the formation and persistence of various develop...

Efficient search in enormous combinatorial spaces is an essential component of intelligence. Humans, for instance, are often found searching for optimal action sequences, linguistic structures and causal explanations. Is there any computational domain that provides good-enough and fast-enough solutions to such a diverse set of problems, yet can be...

Chromosomes are likely to have assembled from unlinked genes in early evolution. Genetic linkage reduces the assortment load and intragenomic conflict in reproducing protocell models to the extent that chromosomes can go to fixation even if chromosomes suffer from a replicative disadvantage, relative to unlinked genes, proportional to their length....

The process by which chemistry can give rise to biology remains one of the biggest mysteries in contemporary science. The de novo synthesis and origin of life both require the functional integration of three key characteristics — replication, metabolism and compartmentalization — into a system that is maintained out of equilibrium and is capable of...

There is increased awareness of the possibility of developmental memories resulting from evolutionary learning. Genetic regulatory and neural networks can be modelled by analogous formalism raising the important question of productive analogies in principles, processes and performance. We investigate the formation and persistence of various develop...

The Stockholm Paradigm suggests that the capacity for pathogens to be associated with a given host is related to the occurrence of specific traits possessed by the host that represent required resources for the pathogen. The capacity for a pathogen to be associated with more than one host is related to how phylogenetically widespread those same res...

Introduction On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a Global Health Emergency of international concern attendant to the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2, nearly two months after the first reported emergence of human cases in Wuhan, China. In the subsequent two months, global, national and local health personnel and infra...

Absztrakt Két kísérlet eredményeit mutatjuk be a cikkben. A kísérleteket az Elliot Aronson által kifejlesztett mozaikmódszerrel végeztük abból a célból, hogy kimutassuk a kooperációs tanulási módszer előnyeit az osztályteremben zajló tanulás során. A kooperáció evolúciós biológiai és szociálpszichológiai értelmezése alapján azt vártuk, hogy az együ...

Discriminating, extracting and encoding temporal regularities is a critical requirement in the brain, relevant to sensory-motor processing and learning. However, the cellular mechanisms responsible remain enigmatic; for example, whether such abilities require specific, elaborately organized neural networks or arise from more fundamental, inherent p...

Complexity of life forms on the Earth has increased tremendously, primarily driven by subsequent evolutionary transitions in individuality, a mechanism in which units formerly being capable of independent replication combine to form higher-level evolutionary units. Although this process has been likened to the recursive combination of pre-adapted s...

A wide variety of human and non-human behavior is computationally well accounted for by probabilistic generative models, formalized consistently in a Bayesian framework. Recently, it has been suggested that another family of adaptive systems, namely, those governed by Darwinian evolutionary dynamics, are capable of implementing building blocks of B...

Sexual reproduction is widespread in nature despite the different kinds of cost that it entails. We do not know exactly when the first sexual process took place and especially why it was beneficial at first. It is clearer why sex is advantageous for the prokaryotes and eukaryotes but the benefit of sex for protocells with individually replicating r...

Complexity of life forms on Earth has increased tremendously, primarily driven by subsequent evolutionary transitions in individuality, a mechanism in which units formerly being capable of independent replication combine to form higher-level evolutionary units. Although this process has been likened to the recursive combination of pre-adapted sub-s...

Experimental evolution allows testing hypotheses derived from theory or from observed patterns in nature. We have designed a droplet-based microfluidic “evolution machine” to test how transient compartmentalization (“trait-groups”) of independent molecular replicators (likely a critical step in the origin of life) could have prevented the spread of...

Supplementary material for: "Playing evolution in the laboratory: from the first major evolutionary transition to global warming"

Background: The evolutionary roots of human moral behavior are a key precondition to understanding human nature. Investigations usually start with a social dilemma and end up with a norm that can provide some insight into the origin of morality. We take the opposite direction by investigating whether the cultural norm that promotes helping parents...

There are two foundational issues concerning the understanding of life: the investigation of the nature of living organisms and the elucidation of the principles of evolution.

The origin of mitochondria was a major evolutionary transition leading to eukaryotes, and is a hotly debated issue. It is unknown whether mitochondria were acquired early or late, and whether it was captured via phagocytosis or syntrophic integration. We present dynamical models to directly simulate the emergence of mitochondria in an ecoevolutiona...

Significance This work contains two major theoretical contributions: Firstly, we define a general set of measures, referred to as interconnectedness, which generalizes and combines classical notions of diversity and modularity. Secondly, we analyze the temporal evolution of interconnectedness based on a microscale model of ecoevolutionary dynamics....

The evolutionary roots of human moral behavior are a key precondition to understand human nature. Here we investigate whether a biological version of Fifth Commandment (“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long”), respected in different variants across cultures, can spread through Darwinian competition. We show by a novel demog...

The well-established framework of evolutionary dynamics can be applied to the fascinating open problems how human brains are able to acquire and adapt language and how languages change in a population. Schemas for handling grammatical constructions are the replicating unit. They emerge and multiply with variation in the brains of individuals and un...

For a long time, insight problem solving has been either understood as nothing special or as a particular class of problem solving. The first view implicates the necessity to find efficient heuristics that restrict the search space, the second, the necessity to overcome self-imposed constraints. Recently, promising hybrid cognitive models attempt t...

The origin of mitochondria is a unique and hard evolutionary problem, embedded within the origin of eukaryotes. The puzzle is challenging due to the egalitarian nature of the transition where lower-level units took over energy metabolism. Contending theories widely disagree on ancestral partners, initial conditions and unfolding of events. There ar...

We propose an evolutionary perspective to classify and characterize the diverse systems of adaptive immunity that have been discovered across all major domains of life. We put forward a new function‐based classification according to the way information is acquired by the immune systems: D arwinian immunity (currently known from, but not necessarily...

Background : The fact that surplus connections and neurons are pruned during development is well established. We complement this selectionist picture by a proof-of-principle model of evolutionary search in the brain, that accounts for new variations in theory space. We present a model for Darwinian evolutionary search for candidate solutions in the...

Why do worker bees give up their own reproduction in favor of other offspring of the queen? Does this make sense from a Darwin- ian point of view, which prescribes maximization of reproductive suc- cess? Ever since Darwin, evolutionary bi- ologists have time and again revisited this problem of how social behavior evolved. There must be some benefit...

Despite major advances in evolutionary theories, some aspects of evolution remain neglected: whether evolution: would come to a halt without abiotic change; is unbounded and open-ended; or is progressive and something beyond fitness is maximized. Here, we discuss some models of ecology and evolution and argue that ecological change, resulting in Re...

In this paper, we show that a neurally implemented a cognitive architecture with evolutionary dynamics can solve the four-tree problem. Our model, called Darwinian Neurodynamics, assumes that the unconscious mechanism of problem solving during insight tasks is a Darwinian process. It is based on the evolution of patterns that represent candidate so...

Beating the curse of the parasite The evolution of molecular replicators was a critical step in the origin of life. Such replicators would have suffered from faster-replicating “molecular parasites” outcompeting the parental replicator. Compartmentalization of replicators inside protocells would have helped ameliorate the effect of parasites. Matsu...

The commentaries [1–4] on our target article [5] raise important points that warrant some discussion and clarification. Blute [1] is correct that there are many aspects of evolutionary biology that correspond to different forms of learning and that we did not address all of them in our Opinion paper [5]. Where we focussed on the evolution of develo...

Background: The fact that surplus connections and neurons are pruned during development is well established. We complement this selectionist picture by a proof-of-principle model of evolutionary search in the brain, that accounts for new variations in theory space. We present a model for Darwinian evolutionary search for candidate solutions in the...

The human brain can generate new ideas, hypotheses and candidate solutions to difficult tasks with surprising ease. We argue that this process has evolutionary dynamics, with multiplication, inheritance and variability all implemented in neural matter. This inspires our model, whose main component is a population of recurrent attractor networks wit...

Mapping insights and frameworks from one scientific domain to another is often useful because it encourages communication between different scientific fields and acts as a conduit for the exchange of mathematical and computational tools. This paper introduces analogies between concepts and mechanisms from molecular biology and language processing....

The theory of evolution links random variation and selection to incremental adaptation. In a different intellectual domain, learning theory links incremental adaptation (e.g., from positive and/or negative reinforcement) to intelligent behaviour. Specifically, learning theory explains how incremental adaptation can acquire knowledge from past exper...

Background The structure and organisation of ecological interactions within an ecosystem is modified by the evolution and coevolution of the individual species it contains. Understanding how historical conditions have shaped this architecture is vital for understanding system responses to change at scales from the microbial upwards. However, in the...

Standard evolutionary dynamics is limited by the constraints of the genetic system. A central message of evolutionary neurodynamics is that evolutionary dynamics in the brain can happen in a neuronal niche in real time, despite the fact that neurons do not reproduce. We show that Hebbian learning and structural synaptic plasticity broaden the capac...

The notion of fitness landscapes, a map between genotype and fitness, was proposed more than 80 years ago. For most of this time data was only available for a few alleles, and thus we had only a restricted view of the whole fitness landscape. Recently, advances in genetics and molecular biology allow a more detailed view of them. Here we review exp...

According to the restructuring hypothesis, insight problem solving typically progresses through consecutive stages of search, impasse, insight, and search again for someone, who solves the task. The order of these stages was determined through self-reports of problem solvers and has never been verified behaviorally. We asked whether individual anal...

Preprint of research paper. Submitted.

Theoretical models of neuronal function consider different mechanisms through which networks learn, classify and discern inputs. A central focus of these models is to understand how associations are established amongst neurons, in order to predict spiking patterns that are compatible with empirical observations. Although these models have led to ma...

With his chemoton theory theoretical biologist and chemical engineer Tibor Gánti was one of the most outstanding intellects behind systems chemistry and the at the foundations of theoretical biology. A brief review of his oeuvre is presented. This essay introduces a special issue dedicated to his memory. Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

The impressive body of work on the major evolutionary transitions in the last 20 y calls for a reconstruction of the theory although a 2D account (evolution of informational systems and transitions in individuality) remains. Significant advances include the concept of fraternal and egalitarian transitions (lower-level units like and unlike, respect...