Happy Darwin Day!
Charles Darwin formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859. Today, in honor of his birthday, we present research and reflections on evolution, which makes sense of our complex world.
- Watch SFI External Professor Michael Hochberg deliver the annual Darwin Lecture for the Linnean Society of London. He discusses how evolution shapes cancer, and how researchers are leveraging this understanding to better treat chemotherapy-resistant tumors.
- Read External Professor Stephanie Forrest's perspective piece for Nature Machine Intelligence, where she and her co-author describe key features of evolutionary computation (EC) — an approach to engineering digital systems that seeks to replicate aspects of Darwinian evolution.
- "There are few places in natural sciences where asking teleological questions is allowed: one is biology," writes SFI Professor Michael Lachmann. "Darwin's theory of natural selection allows us to ask why grasshoppers are green." In award-winning essays, Lachmann and Professor Chris Kempes ask whether universal biological laws can apply to chemistry and physics.
In Case You Missed It — In December, we shared SFI President David Krakauer's op-ed "Playing Go with Darwin" alongside landmark research by External Professor Andreas Wagner and co-authors, that demonstrates how Darwinian selection can influence an organism's capacity to evolve.