The Evolution of Emergent Organization in Immune System Gene Libraries

A binary model of the immune system is used to study the eeects of evolution on the genetic encoding for antibody molecules. One feature of this encoding is that, unlike typical genetic algorithm experiments, not all genes found in the genotype are expressed in the phenotype. We report experiments which show that the evolution of immune system genes, simulated by the genetic algorithm, can induce a high degree of genetic organization even though that organization is not explicitly required by the tness function. We hypothesize about the nature of this organization and introduce a measure called Ham-ming Separation to observe its change during the evolution of the immune system.