BEACON is a consortium of
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- BEACON 2021 Annual Report
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Tag Archives: Digital Evolution
Evolution 101: Digital Evolution
This Evolution 101 post is by MSU graduate student Armand Burks. When scientists study the process of evolution in living organisms, two of the key limiting factors are that of time and the amount of data available. In practice, it … Continue reading
BEACON Researchers at Work: Evolving Virtual Creatures
This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by University of Texas graduate student Dan Lessin and Nicole Lessin. As an undergraduate in the 1990s, I was studying studio art, animation, and computer graphics at Harvard when I first came … Continue reading
Posted in BEACON Researchers at Work
Tagged BEACON Researchers at Work, behavior, Digital Evolution
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What's in a (mutation's) name?
Cross-posted from UT postdoc Art Covert’s blog, Covert Science(ish) Names are generally very arbitrary things. In the words of The Bard: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” This may be true for roses, but for mutations, … Continue reading
BEACON Researchers at Work: Evolving division of labor
This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by MSU graduate student Anya Johnson. Have you ever looked around you and thought about the amazing feats that organisms accomplish together? The most obvious examples are of course everything that humans … Continue reading
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Tagged Avida, Cooperation, Digital Evolution, division of labor
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BEACON Researchers at Work: The Structure of Coevolution
This BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by MSU graduate student Luis Zaman. In my first BEACON blog post, I wrote about how we study the diversity producing effects of host-parasite coevolution in Avida. I used a traffic jam … Continue reading
How and why do animals evolve grouping behavior?
This blog post is reposted from MSU graduate student Randal Olson’s blog. In the concluding remarks of their book Living in Groups, Jens Krause and Graeme Ruxton highlighted “understanding how and why animals evolve grouping behavior” as one of the … Continue reading
Evolutionary excursion into the depth of the human psyche?
This post is by MSU postdoc Arend Hintze. Let me tell you about my excursion to the Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung (Max Planck Institute for Human Development) in Berlin. I met the director Ralph Hertwig a while ago interviewing for a job, … Continue reading
BEACON Researchers at Work: Testing Phylogenetic Inference with Experimental Evolution
This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by MSU graduate student Cory Kohn. Skepticism. This is generally an important characteristic of scientists. Why would an attitude that is to be avoided in polite conversation act as a useful, … Continue reading
BEACON Researchers at Work: A Tyrannosaurus and a virus walk into a bar…
This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by MSU graduate student Alita Burmeister. … the scientist asks “Hey, what do you two have in common?” This summer I met Sue the T. rex. Her fossil remains are the largest, … Continue reading
BEACON Researchers at Work: Reproducing the evolutionary path to human-level intelligence
This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by MSU graduate student Randal Olson. For well over a decade, I have been fascinated with the idea that computers could achieve the same level of intelligence as humans. I would often … Continue reading