The Evolution of Complexity: Simple Simulations of Major Innovations

This book gathers together much of the author’s work – both old and new - to explore a number of the key increases in complexity seen in the natural world, seeking to explain each of them purely in terms of the features of fitness landscapes. In a very straightforward manner, the book introduces basic concepts to help readers follow the main ideas. By using variations of the NK model and including the concept of the Baldwin effect, the author presents new abstract models that are able to explain why sources of evolutionary innovation (genomes, symbiosis, sex, chromosomes, multicellularity) have been selected for and hence how complexity has increased over time in some lineages.

Larry Bull is Professor of artificial intelligence at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK. His main research interest is evolution, the computational modelling of natural systems and its use in artificial systems. He has published widely in areas such as artificial life, evolutionary computing, and unconventional computing. Prof Bull was the Founding Editor-in-Chief for the Springer journal Evolutionary Intelligence and has edited a number of books on evolutionary reinforcement learning.