{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/how-morphological-development-can-guide","title":"How morphological development can guide evolution","arxiv_id":"1711.07387","date":"2017-11-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sam Kriegman","Nick Cheney","Josh Bongard"],"abstract":"Organisms result from adaptive processes interacting across different time\nscales. One such interaction is that between development and evolution. Models\nhave shown that development sweeps over several traits in a single agent,\nsometimes exposing promising static traits. Subsequent evolution can then\ncanalize these rare traits. Thus, development can, under the right conditions,\nincrease evolvability. Here, we report on a previously unknown phenomenon when\nembodied agents are allowed to develop and evolve: Evolution discovers body\nplans robust to control changes, these body plans become genetically\nassimilated, yet controllers for these agents are not assimilated. This allows\nevolution to continue climbing fitness gradients by tinkering with the\ndevelopmental programs for controllers within these permissive body plans. This\nexposes a previously unknown detail about the Baldwin effect: instead of all\nuseful traits becoming genetically assimilated, only traits that render the\nagent robust to changes in other traits become assimilated. We refer to this as\ndifferential canalization. This finding also has implications for the\nevolutionary design of artificial and embodied agents such as robots: robots\nrobust to internal changes in their controllers may also be robust to external\nchanges in their environment, such as transferal from simulation to reality or\ndeployment in novel environments.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07387v5","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.07387v5.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"how-morphological-development-can-guide","repo_url":"https://github.com/skriegman/how-devo-can-guide-evo","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1711.07387","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}