{"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/the-emergence-of-canalization-and","title":"The Emergence of Canalization and Evolvability in an Open-Ended, Interactive Evolutionary System","arxiv_id":"1704.05143","date":"2017-04-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Joost Huizinga","Kenneth O. Stanley","Jeff Clune"],"abstract":"Natural evolution has produced a tremendous diversity of functional\norganisms. Many believe an essential component of this process was the\nevolution of evolvability, whereby evolution speeds up its ability to innovate\nby generating a more adaptive pool of offspring. One hypothesized mechanism for\nevolvability is developmental canalization, wherein certain dimensions of\nvariation become more likely to be traversed and others are prevented from\nbeing explored (e.g. offspring tend to have similarly sized legs, and mutations\naffect the length of both legs, not each leg individually). While ubiquitous in\nnature, canalization almost never evolves in computational simulations of\nevolution. Not only does that deprive us of in silico models in which to study\nthe evolution of evolvability, but it also raises the question of which\nconditions give rise to this form of evolvability. Answering this question\nwould shed light on why such evolvability emerged naturally and could\naccelerate engineering efforts to harness evolution to solve important\nengineering challenges. In this paper we reveal a unique system in which\ncanalization did emerge in computational evolution. We document that genomes\nentrench certain dimensions of variation that were frequently explored during\ntheir evolutionary history. The genetic representation of these organisms also\nevolved to be highly modular and hierarchical, and we show that these\norganizational properties correlate with increased fitness. Interestingly, the\ntype of computational evolutionary experiment that produced this evolvability\nwas very different from traditional digital evolution in that there was no\nobjective, suggesting that open-ended, divergent evolutionary processes may be\nnecessary for the evolution of evolvability.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05143v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.05143v2.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":"the-emergence-of-canalization-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/JoostHuizinga/cppnx","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}