ANOTHER REASON WHY WE SHOULD LOOK AFTER OUR CHILDREN

In many ways, it seems obvious that we should look after, feed and protect our children. However, infants of some species are expected to look after themselves from a very early age. In this paper, I shall present a series of simulations that explore the hypothesis that neural network learning issues alone are sufficient to result in the evolution of long protection periods. By evolving populations of neural network systems that must learn to perform simple classification tasks, I show that lengthy protection periods will emerge automatically, despite associated costs to the parents and children.

[1]  A. Grant,et al.  Life History Evolution , 2002, Heredity.

[2]  Aaron Sloman,et al.  The Altricial-Precocial Spectrum for Robots , 2005, IJCAI.

[3]  C. M. Lessells,et al.  The Evolution of Life Histories , 1994 .

[4]  Marc H. Bornstein,et al.  Development in infancy : an introduction , 2002 .

[5]  John A. Bullinaria,et al.  Simulating the Evolution of Modular Neural Systems , 2001 .

[6]  John A. Bullinaria,et al.  Using evolution to improve neural network learning: pitfalls and solutions , 2007, Neural Computing and Applications.

[7]  John A. Bullinaria.  Evolving efficient learning algorithms for binary mappings , 2003, Neural Networks.

[8]  J. Bullinaria.  From biological models to the evolution of robot control systems , 2003, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.