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Environmental Influence on the Evolution of Morphological Complexity in Machines

Whether, when, how, and why increased complexity evolves in biological populations is a longstanding open question. In this work we combine a recently developed method for evolving virtual organisms with an information-theoretic metric of morphological complexity in order to investigate how the comp...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Auerbach, Joshua E., Bongard, Josh C.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879106/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24391483
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003399
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author Auerbach, Joshua E.
Bongard, Josh C.
author_facet Auerbach, Joshua E.
Bongard, Josh C.
author_sort Auerbach, Joshua E.
collection PubMed
description Whether, when, how, and why increased complexity evolves in biological populations is a longstanding open question. In this work we combine a recently developed method for evolving virtual organisms with an information-theoretic metric of morphological complexity in order to investigate how the complexity of morphologies, which are evolved for locomotion, varies across different environments. We first demonstrate that selection for locomotion results in the evolution of organisms with morphologies that increase in complexity over evolutionary time beyond what would be expected due to random chance. This provides evidence that the increase in complexity observed is a result of a driven rather than a passive trend. In subsequent experiments we demonstrate that morphologies having greater complexity evolve in complex environments, when compared to a simple environment when a cost of complexity is imposed. This suggests that in some niches, evolution may act to complexify the body plans of organisms while in other niches selection favors simpler body plans.
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spelling pubmed-38791062014-01-03 Environmental Influence on the Evolution of Morphological Complexity in Machines Auerbach, Joshua E. Bongard, Josh C. PLoS Comput Biol Research Article Whether, when, how, and why increased complexity evolves in biological populations is a longstanding open question. In this work we combine a recently developed method for evolving virtual organisms with an information-theoretic metric of morphological complexity in order to investigate how the complexity of morphologies, which are evolved for locomotion, varies across different environments. We first demonstrate that selection for locomotion results in the evolution of organisms with morphologies that increase in complexity over evolutionary time beyond what would be expected due to random chance. This provides evidence that the increase in complexity observed is a result of a driven rather than a passive trend. In subsequent experiments we demonstrate that morphologies having greater complexity evolve in complex environments, when compared to a simple environment when a cost of complexity is imposed. This suggests that in some niches, evolution may act to complexify the body plans of organisms while in other niches selection favors simpler body plans. Public Library of Science 2014-01-02 /pmc/articles/PMC3879106/ /pubmed/24391483 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003399 Text en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Auerbach, Joshua E.
Bongard, Josh C.
Environmental Influence on the Evolution of Morphological Complexity in Machines
title Environmental Influence on the Evolution of Morphological Complexity in Machines
title_full Environmental Influence on the Evolution of Morphological Complexity in Machines
title_fullStr Environmental Influence on the Evolution of Morphological Complexity in Machines
title_full_unstemmed Environmental Influence on the Evolution of Morphological Complexity in Machines
title_short Environmental Influence on the Evolution of Morphological Complexity in Machines
title_sort environmental influence on the evolution of morphological complexity in machines
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879106/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24391483
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003399
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