5 research outputs found
Bifurcation into functional niches in adaptation
One of the central questions in evolutionary biology concerns the dynamics of adaptation and diversification. This issue can be addressed experimentally if replicate populations adapting to identical environments Call be investigated in detail. We have studied 501 such replicas Using digital organisms adapting to at least two fundamentally different functional niches (survival strategies) present in the same environment: one in which fast replication is the way to live, and another where exploitation of the environment's complexity leads to complex organisms with longer life spans and smaller replication rates. While these two modes of survival are closely analogous to those expected to emerge in so-called r and K selection scenarios respectively, the bifurcation of evolutionary histories according to these functional niches occurs in identical environments, under identical selective pressures. We find that the branching occurs early, and leads to drastic phenotypic differences (in fitness, sequence length, and gestation time) that are permanent and irreversible. This study confirms an earlier experimental effort using microorganisms, in that diversification can be understood at least in part in terms of bifurcations on saddle points leading to peak shifts, as in the picture drawn by Sewall Wright
Does self-replication imply evolvability?
The most prominent property of life on Earth is its ability to evolve. It is
often taken for granted that self-replication--the characteristic that makes
life possible--implies evolvability, but many examples such as the lack of
evolvability in computer viruses seem to challenge this view. Is evolvability
itself a property that needs to evolve, or is it automatically present within
any chemistry that supports sequences that can evolve in principle? Here, we
study evolvability in the digital life system Avida, where self-replicating
sequences written by hand are used to seed evolutionary experiments. We use 170
self-replicators that we found in a search through 3 billion randomly generated
sequences (at three different sequence lengths) to study the evolvability of
generic rather than hand-designed self-replicators. We find that most can
evolve but some are evolutionarily sterile. From this limited data set we are
led to conclude that evolvability is a likely--but not a guaranteed-- property
of random replicators in a digital chemistry.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. To appear in "Advances in Artificial Life":
Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2015