From: Katarzyna Wilamowska (kasiaw@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 01 2004 - 12:37:12 PST
The evolutionary origin of complex features
Richard E. Lenski, Charles Ofria, Robert T. Pennock & Christoph Adami
Is it search?
I think that this is definitely an example of search since search is
often used to solve phylogeny problems. Typically the problems are
solved in reverse, with data for several children and determining the
path of these children back to their ancestors.
Important ideas in the paper:
Darwin's ideas on the evolution of species is supported by the work of
the authors'. This involves complex creatures evolving from less
complex creatures over many evolutionary and a competition for resources
being necessary for evolution to persist. Several different evolutionary
paths can be taken to achieve the same functionality/complexity in a
future organism.
Thoughts:
The space the authors were searching seemed restricted by the fact that
they seems to be rewarding longer genetic codes, versus shorter genetic
codes. This is a good assumption in general, but for example there is
the genetic sequence of the rat that is evolving very rapidly and yet,
remains small. I would be curious to see how much of the evolved genome
had no functionality and whether this value increased over generations.
The restriction that the organism only received a reward for performing
an action the first time caused all the creatures to evolve in the same
direction. It would be interesting to see what would happen if one
allows smaller rewards for performing the same actions, with all the
actions being rewarded and bigger rewards for evolving to more complex
actions. I would predict that there would be some specialization...
Perhaps it would end up with something more similar to today's world
were we have thousands of tiny organisms that have only a few functions
(bacteria) and only a few (in comparison) complex creatures.
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