Acceleration of Evolutionary Processes by Learning and Extended Fisher's Fundamental Theorem

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that ancestral learning can accelerate evolutionary processes by estimating fitness gradients without communication, extending Fisher's fundamental theorem to quantify this acceleration based on fitness diversity.

Contribution

It introduces ancestral learning as a method for agents to accelerate evolution and extends Fisher's fundamental theorem to quantify this acceleration.

Findings

Ancestral information suffices for gradient estimation.

Learning accelerates evolution without inter-agent communication.

The extended FF-thm links fitness diversity to acceleration.

Abstract

Natural selection is general and powerful concept not only to explain evolutionary processes of biological organisms but also to design engineering systems such as genetic algorithms and particle filters. There is a surge of interest, both from biology and engineering, in considering natural selection of intellectual agents that can learn individually. Learning by individual agents of better behaviors for survival may accelerate the evolutionary processes by natural selection. We have accumulating pieces of evidence that organisms can transmit its information to the next generation via epigenetic states or memes. Also, such idea is important for engineering applications. To accelerate the evolutionary process, an agent should change their strategy so that the population fitness increases the most. Equivalently, an agent should update the strategy towards a gradient of the population fitness. However, it has not yet been clarified whether and how an agent can estimate the gradient and accelerate the evolutionary process. We also lack methodology to quantify the acceleration to understand and predict the impact of learning. In this paper, we address these problems. We show that an learning agent can accelerate the evolutionary process by proposing ancestral learning, which uses the information transmitted from the ancestor (ancestral information). We next show that the ancestral information is sufficient to estimate the gradient. In particular, learning can accelerate the evolutionary process without communications between agents. Finally, to quantify the acceleration, we extend the Fisher's fundamental theorem (FF-thm) for natural selection to ancestral learning. Our extended FF-thm relates the acceleration of the evolutionary process to the variety of individual fitness of the agent. By the theorem, we can quantitatively understand when and why learning is beneficial.