ArticleFrontiers in computational neuroscience2012
Selectionist and evolutionary approaches to brain function: a critical appraisal.
Article in Frontiers in computational neuroscience, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Structural covariance networks in schizophrenia: A systematic review Part II.Schizophrenia research · 2022Pooled it
- Consciousness: its goals, its functions and the emergence of a new category of selection.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- A generalized Price equation for fuzzy set-mappings.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2025Article
- Natural Induction: Spontaneous Adaptive Organisation without Natural Selection.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Controversies in anesthesia-induced developmental neurotoxicity.Best practice & research. Clinical anaesthesiology · 2023Review
- Search and insight processes in card sorting games.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Novelty and imitation within the brain: a Darwinian neurodynamic approach to combinatorial problems.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Can artificial neural replicators be useful for studying RNA replicators?Archives of virology · 2020Article
- A Bayesian Account of Generalist and Specialist Formation Under the Active Inference Framework.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2020Article
- Genomic Variation, Evolvability, and the Paradox of Mental Illness.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- Encoding Temporal Regularities and Information Copying in Hippocampal Circuits.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- From cognitivism to autopoiesis: towards a computational framework for the embodied mind.Synthese · 2018Article
- Expansion and Renormalization of Human Brain Structure During Skill Acquisition.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2017Review
- Insight into the ten-penny problem: guiding search by constraints and maximization.Psychological research · 2017Article
- Cognitive Architecture with Evolutionary Dynamics Solves Insight Problem.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
- Unsupervised Learning in an Ensemble of Spiking Neural Networks Mediated by ITDP.PLoS computational biology · 2016Article
- Universal Darwinism As a Process of Bayesian Inference.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2016Article
- Breeding novel solutions in the brain: a model of Darwinian neurodynamics.F1000Research · 2016Article
- On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Review
- What can ecosystems learn? Expanding evolutionary ecology with learning theory.Biology direct · 2015Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We consider approaches to brain dynamics and function that have been claimed to be Darwinian. These include Edelman's theory of neuronal group selection, Changeux's theory of synaptic selection and selective stabilization of pre-representations, Seung's Darwinian synapse, Loewenstein's synaptic melioration, Adam's selfish synapse, and Calvin's replicating activity patterns. Except for the last two, the proposed mechanisms are selectionist but not truly Darwinian, because no replicators with information transfer to copies and hereditary variation can be identified in them. All of them fit, however, a generalized selectionist framework conforming to the picture of Price's covariance formulation, which deliberately was not specific even to selection in biology, and therefore does not imply an algorithmic picture of biological evolution. Bayesian models and reinforcement learning are formally in agreement with selection dynamics. A classification of search algorithms is shown to include Darwinian replicators (evolutionary units with multiplication, heredity, and variability) as the most powerful mechanism for search in a sparsely occupied search space. Examples are given of cases where parallel competitive search with information transfer among the units is more efficient than search without information transfer between units. Finally, we review our recent attempts to construct and analyze simple models of true Darwinian evolutionary units in the brain in terms of connectivity and activity copying of neuronal groups. Although none of the proposed neuronal replicators include miraculous mechanisms, their identification remains a challenge but also a great promise.
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