Environmental influence on the evolution of morphological complexity in machines

PLoS Comput Biol. 2014 Jan;10(1):e1003399. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003399. Epub 2014 Jan 2.

Abstract

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Biological Evolution*
  • Computational Biology
  • Computer Simulation
  • Environment
  • Genome
  • Humans
  • Locomotion
  • Models, Biological
  • Models, Genetic
  • Neural Networks, Computer

Grants and funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov/) Grant PECASE-0953837 and DARPA (http://www.darpa.mil/) M3 grant W911NF-1-11-0076. The authors also acknowledge the Vermont Advanced Computing Core which is supported by NASA (http://www.nasa.gov/) (NNX 06AC88G) at the University of Vermont for providing High Performance Computing resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.