Spontaneous Emergence of Modularity in a Model of Evolving Individuals
Populations and Evolution
2009-11-13 v1
Abstract
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of modularity correlates with the rapidity and severity of environmental change. The modularity arises as a synergistic response to the noise in the environment in the presence of horizontal gene transfer. We suggest that the hierarchical structure observed in the natural world may be a broken symmetry state, which generically results from evolution in a changing environment.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0710.3436,
title = {Spontaneous Emergence of Modularity in a Model of Evolving Individuals},
author = {Jun Sun and Michael W. Deem},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0710.3436},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett