The phenotypic plasticity of an evolving digital organism.

ABSTRACT: Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades. Therefore, understanding the extent to which species will cope with rising temperatures is of paramount importance. Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an organism to change the morphological and functional traits encoded by its genome in response to the environment. I show here that plasticity pervades not only natural but also artificial systems that mimic the developmental process of biological organisms, such as self-replicating and evolving computer programs-digital organisms. Specifically, the environment can modify the sequence of instructions executed from a digital organism's genome (i.e. its transcriptome), which results in changes in its phenotype (i.e. the ability of the digital organism to perfo

SUBMITTER: Fortuna MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9470259 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature