From the Publisher:

"This is the best general book on Genetic Algorithms written to date. It covers background, history, and motivation; it selects important, informative examples of applications and discusses the use of Genetic Algorithms in scientific models; and it gives a good account of the status of the theory of Genetic Algorithms. Best of all the book presents its material in clear, straightforward, felicitous prose, accessible to anyone with a college-level scientific background. If you want a broad, solid understanding of Genetic Algorithms -- where they came from, what's being done with them, and where they are going -- this is the book.
-- John H. Holland, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, and Professor of Psychology, The University of Michigan; External Professor, the Santa Fe Institute. 
Genetic algorithms have been used in science and engineering as adaptive algorithms for solving practical problems and as computational models of natural evolutionary systems. This brief, accessible introduction describes some of the most interesting research in the field and also enables readers to implement and experiment with genetic algorithms on their own. It focuses in depth on a small set of important and interesting topics -- particularly in machine learning, scientific modeling, and artificial life -- and reviews a broad span of research, including the work of Mitchell and her colleagues. 
The descriptions of applications and modeling projects stretch beyond the strict boundaries of computer science to include dynamical systems theory, game theory, molecular biology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and population genetics, underscoring the exciting "general purpose" nature of genetic algorithms as search methods that can be employed across disciplines. 
An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms is accessible to students and researchers in any scientific discipline. It includes many thought and computer exercises that build on and reinforce the reader's understanding of the text. 
The first chapter introduces genetic algorithms and their terminology and describes two provocative applications in detail. The second and third chapters look at the use of genetic algorithms in machine learning (computer programs, data analysis and prediction, neural networks) and in scientific models (interactions among learning, evolution, and culture; sexual selection; ecosystems; evolutionary activity). Several approaches to the theory of genetic algorithms are discussed in depth in the fourth chapter. The fifth chapter takes up implementation, and the last chapter poses some currently unanswered questions and surveys prospects for the future of evolutionary computation.

/pdf/an-introduction-to-genetic-algorithms-32faq13a56.pdf

An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers. "This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life...Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory...He ...examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large."--D. W. Harding, New York Review of Books "[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive...This is a book we should all read and ponder."--Roger Keesing, American Anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was the author of Naven and Mind and Nature.

https://systemika.g-i.cz/record/1027/files/Steps to an Ecology of Mind.pdf

Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Cells of a multicellular organism are genetically homogeneous but structurally and functionally heterogeneous owing to the differential expression of genes. Many of these differences in gene expression arise during development and are subsequently retained through mitosis. Stable alterations of this kind are said to be 'epigenetic', because they are heritable in the short term but do not involve mutations of the DNA itself. Research over the past few years has focused on two molecular mechanisms that mediate epigenetic phenomena: DNA methylation and histone modifications. Here, we review advances in the understanding of the mechanism and role of DNA methylation in biological processes. Epigenetic effects by means of DNA methylation have an important role in development but can also arise stochastically as animals age. Identification of proteins that mediate these effects has provided insight into this complex process and diseases that occur when it is perturbed. External influences on epigenetic processes are seen in the effects of diet on long-term diseases such as cancer. Thus, epigenetic mechanisms seem to allow an organism to respond to the environment through changes in gene expression. The extent to which environmental effects can provoke epigenetic responses represents an exciting area of future research.

/pdf/epigenetic-regulation-of-gene-expression-how-the-genome-55fnpf16ec.pdf

Epigenetic regulation of gene expression: how the genome integrates intrinsic and environmental signals

Epistasis plays a role in determining the phenotype, yet quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping has uncovered little evidence for it. To address this apparent contradiction, we analyzed interactions between individual Lycopersicon pennellii chromosome segments introgressed into an otherwise homogeneous genetic background of L. esculentum (cv. M82). Ten different homozygous introgression lines, each containing from 4 to 58 cM of introgressed DNA, were crossed in a half diallele scheme. The 45 derived double heterozygotes were evaluated in the field for four yield-associated traits, along with the 10 single heterozygotes and M82. Of 180 (45 X 4) tested interactions, 28% were epistatic (P < 0.05) on both linear and geometric scales. The detected epistasis was predominately less-than-additive, i.e., the effect of the double heterozygotes was smaller than the sum of the effects of the corresponding single heterozygotes. Epistasis was also found for homozygous linked QTL affecting fruit mass and total soluble solids. Although the frequency of epistasis was high, additivity was the major component in the interaction of pairs of QTL. We propose that the diminishing additivity of QTL effects is amplified when more loci are involved; this mode of epistasis may be an important factor in phenotype canalization and in breeding.

https://www.genetics.org/content/genetics/143/4/1807.full.pdf

Less-than-additive epistatic interactions of quantitative trait loci in tomato.

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/turing1952.pdf

The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis

THE battle, which raged for so long between the theories of evolution supported by geneticists on one hand and by naturalists on the other, has in recent years gone strongly in favour of the former. Few biologists now doubt that genetical investigation has revealed at any rate the most important categories of hereditary variation ; and the classical 'naturalist' theory-the inheritance of acquired characters-has been very generally relegated to the background because, in the forms in which it has been put forward, it has required a type of hereditary variation for the existence of which there was no adequate evidence. The long popularity of the theory was based, not on any positive evidence for it, but on its usefulness in accounting for some of the most striking of the results of evolution. Naturalists cannot fail to be continually and deeply impressed by the adaptation of an organism to its surroundings and of the parts of the organism to each other. These adaptive characters are inherited and some explanation of this must be provided. If we are deprived of the hypothesis of the inheritance of the effects of use and disuse, we seem thrown back on an exclusive reliance on the natural selection of merely chance mutations. It is doubtful, however, whether even the most statistically minded geneticists are entirely satisfied that nothing more is involved than the sorting out of random mutations by the natural selective filter. It is the purpose of this short communication to suggest that recent views on the nature of the developmental process make it easier to understand how the genotypes of evolving organisms can respond to the environment in a more co-ordinated fashion.

Canalization of development and the inheritance of acquired characters

First published in 1957, this essential classic work bridged the gap between analytical and theoretical biology, thus setting the insights of the former in a context which more sensitively reflects the ambiguities surrounding many of its core concepts and objectives. 
Specifically, these five essays are concerned with some of the major problems of classical biology: the precise character of biological organisation, the processes which generate it, and the specifics of evolution. With regard to these issues, some thinkers suggest that biological organisms are not merely distinguishable from inanimate ‘things’ in terms of complexity, but are in fact radically different qualitatively: they exemplify some constitutive principle which is not elsewhere manifested.
It is the desire to bring such ideas into conformity with our understanding of analytical biology which unifies these essays. They explore the contours of a conceptual framework sufficiently wide to embrace all aspects of living systems.

The strategy of the genes

Under the influence of natural selection, development tends to become canalised so that more or less normal organs and tissues are produced even in the face of slight abnormalities of the genotype or of the external environment (Waddington, 1940). It has been suggested that if an animal is subjected to unusual circumstances to which it can react in an adaptive manner, the development of the adaptive character might itself become so far canalised that it continued to appear even when the conditions returned to the previous norm (Waddington, 1942). This mechanism would provide a means by which an "acquired character" in the conventional sense could be "assimilated" by the genotype, and eventually appear comparatively independent of any specific environmental influence. Schmalhausen (1947) has independently suggested a very similar process, which he has discussed at some length under the name "stabilising selection"; a phrase which, however, he uses in a number of different senses, as Simpson (1947) has pointed out. The purpose of the present communication is to describe an experiment in which this hypothesis was tested and shown to operate as expected. A preliminary account of the work has been published in Waddington (1952a). The laborious work of classifying the large numbers of individuals involved was carried out by my technical assistant, Miss Evelyn Paton, to whose care and devotion I should like to pay a tribute.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1558-5646.1953.tb00070.x

Genetic assimilation of an acquired character

Preface 1 Form, End and Time 2 The Cybernetics of Development 3 Selection Of, For and By 4 The Organisation of the Gene Pool 5 The Survival of the Adaptable Epilogue Appendix: Some Physico-Chemical Aspects of Biological Organisation

Conrad Hal Waddington

Papers

Canalization of development and the inheritance of acquired characters

Canalization of development and the inheritance of acquired characters

The strategy of the genes

Genetic assimilation of an acquired character

The strategy of the genes : a discussion of some aspects of theoretical biology