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Symbiotic Composition and Evolvability

Symbiotic Composition and Evolvability
Symbiotic Composition and Evolvability
Several of the Major Transitions in natural evolution, such as the symbiogenic origin of eukaryotes from prokaryotes, share the feature that existing entities became the components of composite entities at a higher level of organisation. This composition of pre-adapted extant entities into a new whole is a fundamentally different source of variation from the gradual accumulation of small random variations, and it has some interesting consequences for issues of evolvability. In this paper we present a very abstract model of 'symbiotic composition' to explore its possible impact on evolvability. A particular adaptive landscape is used to exemplify a class where symbiotic composition has an adaptive advantage with respect to evolution under mutation and sexual recombination. Whilst innovation using conventional evolutionary algorithms becomes increasingly more difficult as evolution continues in this problem, innovation via symbiotic composition continues through successive hierarchical levels unimpeded.
480-490
Watson, Richard A.
ce199dfc-d5d4-4edf-bd7b-f9e224c96c75
Pollack, Jordan B.
9ec3d634-1257-4bdc-b7d7-7d1aad22faf4
Kelemen, Jozef
9c997203-be27-4596-bbea-336d2fd69b7f
Sos, Petr
d79802e8-bbdb-4cb4-8c38-3499682dbc63
Watson, Richard A.
ce199dfc-d5d4-4edf-bd7b-f9e224c96c75
Pollack, Jordan B.
9ec3d634-1257-4bdc-b7d7-7d1aad22faf4
Kelemen, Jozef
9c997203-be27-4596-bbea-336d2fd69b7f
Sos, Petr
d79802e8-bbdb-4cb4-8c38-3499682dbc63

Watson, Richard A. and Pollack, Jordan B. , Kelemen, Jozef and Sos, Petr (eds.) (2001) Symbiotic Composition and Evolvability. Proceedings of European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2001), 480-490.

Record type: Article

Abstract

Several of the Major Transitions in natural evolution, such as the symbiogenic origin of eukaryotes from prokaryotes, share the feature that existing entities became the components of composite entities at a higher level of organisation. This composition of pre-adapted extant entities into a new whole is a fundamentally different source of variation from the gradual accumulation of small random variations, and it has some interesting consequences for issues of evolvability. In this paper we present a very abstract model of 'symbiotic composition' to explore its possible impact on evolvability. A particular adaptive landscape is used to exemplify a class where symbiotic composition has an adaptive advantage with respect to evolution under mutation and sexual recombination. Whilst innovation using conventional evolutionary algorithms becomes increasingly more difficult as evolution continues in this problem, innovation via symbiotic composition continues through successive hierarchical levels unimpeded.

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Published date: 2001
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 262008
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/262008
PURE UUID: 894376df-11c2-4cd9-83ae-33097f6b830e
ORCID for Richard A. Watson: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-2521-8255

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 21 Feb 2006
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:21

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Contributors

Author: Richard A. Watson ORCID iD
Author: Jordan B. Pollack
Editor: Jozef Kelemen
Editor: Petr Sos

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