Related papers: Degenerate neutrality creates evolvable fitness la…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
The functioning of many biochemical networks is often robust -- remarkably stable under changes in external conditions and internal reaction parameters. Much recent work on robustness and evolvability has focused on the structure of neutral…
Robustness and evolvability are essential properties to the evolution of biological networks. To determine if a biological network is robust and/or evolvable, it is required to compare its functions before and after mutations. However, this…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…
Engineered systems are designed to deftly operate under predetermined conditions yet are notoriously fragile when unexpected perturbations arise. In contrast, biological systems operate in a highly flexible manner; learn quickly adequate…
Degeneracy is the ability of structurally different elements to perform the same function or yield the same output under certain constraints. In contrast to redundancy, which implies identical backups, degeneracy allows diverse components…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
Evolution depends on the possibility of successfully exploring fitness landscapes via mutation and recombination. With these search procedures, exploration is difficult in "rugged" fitness landscapes, where small mutations can drastically…
Control of the living cell functions with remarkable reliability despite the stochastic nature of the underlying molecular networks -- a property presumably optimized by biological evolution. We here ask to what extent the property of a…
Evolvability is the capacity to evolve. This paper introduces a simple computational model of evolvability and demonstrates that, under certain conditions, evolvability can increase indefinitely, even when there is no direct selection for…
The role of historical contingency in the origin of life is one of the great unknowns in modern science. Only one example of life exists--one that proceeded from a single self-replicating organism (or a set of replicating hyper-cycles) to…
The theory of evolvability, introduced by Valiant (2009), formalizes evolution as a constrained learning algorithm operating without labeled examples or structural knowledge. While theoretical work has established the evolvability of…
Redundancy is a fundamental characteristic of many biological processes such as those in the genetic, visual, muscular and nervous system; yet its function has not been fully understood. The conventional interpretation of redundancy is that…
The structure of ecological networks, in particular food webs, determines their ability to evolve further, i.e. evolvability. The knowledge about how food web evolvability is determined by the structures of diverse ecological networks can…
Neutral landscapes and mutational robustness are believed to be important enablers of evolvability in biology. We apply these concepts to software, defining mutational robustness to be the fraction of random mutations that leave a program's…
It has been hypothesized that one of the main reasons evolution has been able to produce such impressive adaptations is because it has improved its own ability to evolve -- "the evolution of evolvability". Rupert Riedl, for example, an…
Evolvability refers to the ability of an individual genotype (solution) to produce offspring with mutually diverse phenotypes. Recent research has demonstrated that divergent search methods, particularly novelty search, promote evolvability…
Evolvability is an important feature that impacts the ability of evolutionary processes to find interesting novel solutions and to deal with changing conditions of the problem to solve. The estimation of evolvability is not straightforward…