Evolutionary Computation, Evolvability, and Python  By |
2013/05/27  Funnily enough, an antievolutionist brought a recent
article on evolvability to my attention. The paper,
“Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvability without the
Pressure to Adapt”, by Joel Lehman and Kenneth O. Stanley, is on
PLOS One. Here’s their abstract:   The first couple of their
simulated models take a very conceptual approach to assessing
genetic drift and evolvability. They instantiate organisms as
having a genotype of two integer values and a heritable
“evolvability”, which is simply the effective per-locus mutation
rate. The two integer values are interpreted as points in a
plane. (All of the Lehman and Stanley models in this research
involve 2D planes.) Each organism chosen for reproduction
produces two possibly-mutated offspring for the next generation.
Each run begins with a single organism with a genotype of (0,0)
and evolvability of 0.05. The population is capped at 40,000
organisms. Each run goes for 3,000 generatio