A few weeks ago we looked at a simulation of technological evolution by economist Brian Arthur, in which he was able to start with simple building blocks (such as a NAND gate) and evolve surprisingly complex circuits (such as a 12-way AND gate or a 4-bit adder) by randomly combining increasingly useful existing components.
The simulation of parallel information acquisition maps perfectly onto the mathematics of transformer attention. An Iranian mathematical biologist, Shahshahani, demonstrated in 1979 that evolutionary models are actually gradient flows optimizing the Fisher information metric.
In this framework, asexual "clonal interference" is a triviality failure mode, which means the system’s unique attractor collapsing into a single uniform state. Sexual reproduction avoids this by maintaining metastable multi-cluster states, preserving the structural divergence necessary to accumulate "bits" of certainty without collapsing the search space.
Kind of ironic that these insights rely, evidently, on extremely large collections of NAND gates wired in complex, modular ways (otherwise known as computers).
Possibly irrelevant to the point you are trying to make (I'm not sure), but the phenomenon of "crossing over" is maybe an even more important advantage of sexual reproduction: shuffling the genes on a particular chromosome between parents results in a situation in which every gene is evolving independently, as it were, instead of being stuck as a part of a fixed ensemble. At lease this is a conclusion I came to when I thought about it many years ago.
The simulation of parallel information acquisition maps perfectly onto the mathematics of transformer attention. An Iranian mathematical biologist, Shahshahani, demonstrated in 1979 that evolutionary models are actually gradient flows optimizing the Fisher information metric.
I explored this isomorphism in a short essay here https://www.symmetrybroken.com/asymmetric-evolution/. There is a connection between these mathematics and the mathematics of transformers too.
In this framework, asexual "clonal interference" is a triviality failure mode, which means the system’s unique attractor collapsing into a single uniform state. Sexual reproduction avoids this by maintaining metastable multi-cluster states, preserving the structural divergence necessary to accumulate "bits" of certainty without collapsing the search space.
Kind of ironic that these insights rely, evidently, on extremely large collections of NAND gates wired in complex, modular ways (otherwise known as computers).
Ironic might not be quite the right word for it!
Possibly irrelevant to the point you are trying to make (I'm not sure), but the phenomenon of "crossing over" is maybe an even more important advantage of sexual reproduction: shuffling the genes on a particular chromosome between parents results in a situation in which every gene is evolving independently, as it were, instead of being stuck as a part of a fixed ensemble. At lease this is a conclusion I came to when I thought about it many years ago.