Mutation rules and the evolution of sparseness and modularity in biological systems.

ABSTRACT: Biological systems exhibit two structural features on many levels of organization: sparseness, in which only a small fraction of possible interactions between components actually occur; and modularity--the near decomposability of the system into modules with distinct functionality. Recent work suggests that modularity can evolve in a variety of circumstances, including goals that vary in time such that they share the same subgoals (modularly varying goals), or when connections are costly. Here, we studied the origin of modularity and sparseness focusing on the nature of the mutation process, rather than on connection cost or variations in the goal. We use simulations of evolution with different mutation rules. We found that commonly used sum-rule mutations, in which interactions are mutate

SUBMITTER: Friedlander T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3735639 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature