István Zachar

István Zachar is a theoretical evolutionary biologist researching problems related to the major evolutionary transitions, like the origin of life, eukaryotic cells, human cognition and language. He graduated at the Eötvös University, Budapest, in 2004, and is mostly working there ever since. He got his PhD in 2011 on his work on replicator theory, aiming to provide a sound, more-than-philosophical basis for the replicator as the unit of evolution. He also worked on human insight problem-solving at the Queen Mary University of London, performing experiments with human subjects, and also was an informal participant in the EU FET-open project “INSIGHT“. He is interested in abstract, theoretical problems that lend themselves nicely for computer modeling, as he is an avid programmer. At present, he is working on modeling Darwinian neurodynamics and also develops in his free time software to study the evolutionary sound-changes of (artificial) languages, as a homage to J. R. R. Tolkien.

Topic: Computational Modelling of Insight Problem Solution with Evolutionary Algorithms