This confusion comes about because natural selection has no mechanism to maintain variation. Equivalently, gradient descent can only work with the data provided or in other words it has no “proposal” step like Gibbs sampling or MCMC. So the idea that gradient descent and natural selection are the same feels intuitive to me. (Caveat being frequency-dependent selection.)
It is also known that some models of evolutionary game theory recover Fisher’s theorem of natural selection as a consequence of the replicator equation (a model of natural selection) as a gradient flow, see this arxiv paper. (Might have bungled the explanation on this one, so take with some salt.)
This confusion comes about because natural selection has no mechanism to maintain variation. Equivalently, gradient descent can only work with the data provided or in other words it has no “proposal” step like Gibbs sampling or MCMC. So the idea that gradient descent and natural selection are the same feels intuitive to me. (Caveat being frequency-dependent selection.)
It is also known that some models of evolutionary game theory recover Fisher’s theorem of natural selection as a consequence of the replicator equation (a model of natural selection) as a gradient flow, see this arxiv paper. (Might have bungled the explanation on this one, so take with some salt.)