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The increasing volume of ecologically and biologically relevant data has revealed a wide collection of emergent patterns in living systems. Analyzing different datasets, ranging from metabolic gene-regulatory to species interaction…

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…

Phenotype of biological systems needs to be robust against mutation in order to sustain themselves between generations. On the other hand, phenotype of an individual also needs to be robust against fluctuations of both internal and external…

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…

The characterization of plasticity, robustness, and evolvability, an important issue in biology, is studied in terms of phenotypic fluctuations. By numerically evolving gene regulatory networks, the proportionality between the phenotypic…

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…

The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…

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…

Biological functions are generated as a result of developmental dynamics that form phenotypes governed by genotypes. The dynamical system for development is shaped through genetic evolution following natural selection based on the fitness…

Evolvability is defined as the ability of a population to generate heritable variation to facilitate its adaptation to new environments or selection pressures. In this article, we consider evolvability as a phenotypic trait subject to…

Why evolvability appears to have increased over evolutionary time is an important unresolved biological question. Unlike most candidate explanations, this paper proposes that increasing evolvability can result without any pressure to adapt.…

Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…

The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, we propose a new computational method to investigate the particularities of evolution. Second, we apply this method to a model of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) and explore the evolution of…

Robustness is often regarded as a critical future challenge for real-world applications, where stability is essential. However, as models often learn tasks in a similar order, we hypothesize that easier tasks will be easier regardless of…

Biological networks such as gene regulatory networks possess desirable properties. They are more robust and controllable than random networks. This motivates the search for structural and dynamical features that evolution has incorporated…

Living organisms, ecosystems, and social systems are examples of complex systems in which robustness against inclusion of new elements is an essential feature. A recently proposed simple model has revealed a general mechanism by which such…

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…

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…

Natural evolution has produced a tremendous diversity of functional organisms. Many believe an essential component of this process was the evolution of evolvability, whereby evolution speeds up its ability to innovate by generating a more…