Related papers: Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvabilit…
Background: Acceleration of adaptation dynamics by stress-induced hypermutation has been found experimentally. Evolved evolvability is a prominent explanation. We investigate a more generally applicable explanation by a physical constraint.…
All possible phenotypes are not equally accessible to evolving populations. In fact, only phenotypes of large size, i.e. those resulting from many different genotypes, are found in populations of sequences, presumably because they are…
Designing evolutionary algorithms capable of uncovering highly evolvable representations is an open challenge; such evolvability is important because it accelerates evolution and enables fast adaptation to changing circumstances. This paper…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
The evolution and function of imitation have always been placed within the confines of animal learning and associated with its crucial role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution. Can imitation evolve as a form of phenotypic…
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 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…
Natural selection and random drift are competing phenomena for explaining the evolution of populations. Combining a highly fit mutant with a population structure that improves the odds that the mutant spreads through the whole population…
The most prominent property of life on Earth is its ability to evolve. It is often taken for granted that self-replication--the characteristic that makes life possible--implies evolvability, but many examples such as the lack of…
Non-uniform rates of morphological evolution and evolutionary increases in organismal complexity, captured in metaphors like "adaptive zones", "punctuated equilibrium" and "blunderbuss patterns", require more elaborate explanations than a…
Expression level is known to be a strong determinant of a protein's rate of evolution. But the converse can also be true: evolutionary dynamics can affect expression levels of proteins. Having implications in both directions fosters the…
Questions on possible relationship between phenotypic plasticity and evolvability, as well as that between robustness and evolution have been addressed over decades in the field of evolution-development. By introducing an evolutionary…
Phylostratigraphy suggests that new genes are continually born de novo from non-genic sequences, and the genes that persist found new lineages, contributing to the adaptive evolution of organisms. While recent evidence supports the view…
The adaptation rate in theoretical models of biological evolution increases with the mutation rate but only to a point when mutations into lethal states cause extinction. One would expect that removing such states should be beneficial for…
Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…
Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phenotypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evolution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law…
Most theories of evolutionary diversification are based on equilibrium assumptions: they are either based on optimality arguments involving static fitness landscapes, or they assume that populations first evolve to an equilibrium state…
Mutational neighbourhoods in genotype-phenotype (GP) maps are widely believed to be more likely to share characteristics than expected from random chance. Such genetic correlations should, as John Maynard Smith famously pointed out,…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
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…