Selectionist and Evolutionary Approaches to Brain Function: A Critical Appraisal

By Chrisantha Fernando, Eörs Szathmáry, P. Husbands. 2012

89 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Cognitive Neuroscience, Genetics

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Genetics

Citations in the corpus

PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks (2017, background): “The concept of the PathNet was ﬁrst conceived of within the framework of Darwinian Neurodynamics as an attempt to envisage how evolutionary algorithms could be implemented in the brain [5].”
On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems (2016, background): “It is interesting that the converse proposal has been made as well, to understand brain dynamics via a selectionist model (Fernando et al., 2012).”
Online Extreme Evolutionary Learning Machines (2014, unknown): “Feature evolution, as inspired by the Neuronal Replicator Hypothesis, is a promising method for online learning tasks.”
From cognitivism to autopoiesis: towards a computational framework for the embodied mind (2016, background): “Indeed, the notion that evolution is itself a predictive processing engine is receiving greater attention in theoretical biology; e.g., Fisher’s fundamental theorem and replicator formulations as Bayesian ﬁlters (Fernando et al. 2012; Harper 2011).”
Neuronal boost to evolutionary dynamics (2015, background): “[5] and Edelman [6] proposed a selectionist [7] framework for brain function.”