Why Phenotype Robustness Promotes Phenotype Evolvability

Why Phenotype Robustness Promotes Phenotype Evolvability

Robustness and evolvability are fundamental characteristics of life whose relationship has intrigued generations of biologists. Studies of several genotype-phenotype maps (GPMs) such as the map between short DNA sequences and their bindings to transcription factors showed that phenotype robustness (PR) promotes phenotype evolvability (PE), but the underlying reason is unclear. Here, we show mat...

Genotype, phenotype, and virtual phenotype: who needs what and why?

Modeling Breast Acini in Tissue Culture for Detection of Malignant Phenotype Reversion to Non-Malignant Phenotype

Backgrounds: Evidence is accumulating to support disruption of tissue architecture as a powerful event in tumor formation. For the past four decades, intensive cancer research with the premise of “cancer as a cell based-disease” focused on finding oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes. However, the role of the tissue architecture was neglected. Three dimensional (3D) cell cultures which can recap...

Robustness to Faults Promotes Evolvability: Insights from Evolving Digital Circuits

We demonstrate how the need to cope with operational faults enables evolving circuits to find more fit solutions. The analysis of the results obtained in different experimental conditions indicates that, in absence of faults, evolution tends to select circuits that are small and have low phenotypic variability and evolvability. The need to face operation faults, instead, drives evolution toward...

Neutral Networks and Evolvability with Complex Genotype-Phenotype Mapping

In this paper, we investigate a neutral epoch during an optimisation run with complex genotype-to-fitness mapping. The behaviour of the search process during neutral epochs is of importance for evolutionary robotics and other artificial-life approaches that evolve problem solutions; recent work has argued that evolvability may change during these epochs. We investigate the distribution of offsp...