--- layout: default --- Publication details Who Needs Genomes? Barry McMullin, Tim Taylor, Axel von Kamp 2001 Abstract The first detailed mechanistic models for genome based reproduction were developed by John von Neumann in the period 1948-1953. While these models were extremely abstract, subsequent elaboration of the structure and function of DNA proved von Neumann’s designs to have been strikingly prescient. However, some significant questions still remain as to the specific benefits of this particular reproductive architecture. These questions are relevant both to understanding the evolutionary emergence of such systems, and their proper role in engineered or synthetic evolutionary systems. This paper will review these issues, and present some preliminary results of novel evolutionary experiments in the Tierra system, where artificial "organisms" are deliberately engineered to have an evolvable genetic architecture Full text Author preprint: pdf Reference McMullin, B., Taylor, T., & von Kamp, A. (2001). Who Needs Genomes? Proceedings of the Atlantic Symposium on Computational Biology and Genome Information Systems and Technology, CBGIST 2001, 250–254. Duke University, USA. BibTeX @inproceedings{mcmullin2001who, author = {McMullin, Barry and Taylor, Tim and {von Kamp}, Axel}, title = {Who Needs Genomes?}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Atlantic Symposium on Computational Biology and Genome Information Systems and Technology, CBGIST 2001}, year = {2001}, pages = {250-254}, month = mar, address = {Duke University, USA}, category = {conference}, keywords = {selfrep} } Related publications
  1. Taylor, T. (2024). An Afterword to "Rise of the Self-Replicators": Placing John A. Etzler, Frigyes Karinthy, Fred Stahl, and Others in the Early History of Thought About Self-Reproducing Machines. Artificial Life, 30(1), 91–105. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00424
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  2. Taylor, T. (2020). What Am I For? Self-Purpose and Self-Reproduction in Rossum’s Universal Robots (Samoúčelnost a samoreprodukce u Rossumových univerzálních robotů). In J. Čejková (Ed.), ROBOT 100: Sto rozumů (pp. 178–180). Prague: Kosmas.
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  3. Taylor, T., & Dorin, A. (2020). Rise of the Self-Replicators: Early Visions of Machines, AI and Robots That Can Reproduce and Evolve. Cham: Springer.
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  4. Taylor, T., & Dorin, A. (2018). Past Visions of Artificial Futures: One Hundred and Fifty Years under the Spectre of Evolving Machines. In T. Ikegami, N. Virgo, O. Witkowski, M. Oka, R. Suzuki, & H. Iizuka (Eds.), ALIFE 2018: Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2018 (pp. 91–98). https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00022
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  5. Taylor, T. (2000). Some Representational and Ecological Aspects of Evolvability. In C. L. Nehaniv (Ed.), Proceedings of the Evolvability Workshop at the the Seventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (Artificial Life 7) (pp. 41–44). Retrieved from http://homepages.herts.ac.uk/ comqcln/al7ev/cnts.html
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  6. Taylor, T. (1999). On Self-Reproduction and Evolvability. In D. Floreano, J.-D. Nicoud, & F. Mondada (Eds.), Advances in Artificial Life. ECAL 1999 (pp. 94–103). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48304-7_15
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  7. Taylor, T. J. (1999). From Artificial Evolution to Artificial Life (PhD thesis). School of Informatics, College of Science and Engineering, University of Edinburgh.
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  8. Taylor, T., & Hallam, J. (1997). Studying Evolution with Self-Replicating Computer Programs. In P. Husbands & I. Harvey (Eds.), Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life (pp. 550–559). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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