[FRIAM] Rugged fitness landscapes

[Phil Henshaw]

Well, it seems to open up to a wide variety of probably both feasible
and infeasible mechanisms.  I think for small changes to have large
effects there needs to be developmental process, i.e. a form of feedback
of some sort.  There are a *great* many possible means of establishing
process feedback.  That that mechanism, having results stimulate causes,
has been ruled out of evolution theory for over a century seems to me to
indicate a lack of imagination.


Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: friam-bounces at redfish.com 
> [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
> Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 6:59 AM
> To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Rugged fitness landscapes
> 
> 
> 
> Yes, his work contains interesting ideas. I especially
> like the appealing idea of correlating interdependencies 
> in the genotype with the ruggedness of fitness landscapes, 
> although it is probably to simple. Are interdependencies 
> between modules in the genotypes a reason why small changes
> in the genotype could have large effects on reproduction 
> rates ? It seems plausible, but hard to prove.
> 
> The fitness function depends in general on the 
> success of the phenotype (reproduction rates), and the 
> relationship between genotype and phenotype is very 
> complex and non-linear. The fitness of a phenotype 
> is easy to determine, but hard to calculate from the 
> genotype. This is similar to NP-complete problems: 
> the quality of a solution is easy to verify, but the
> solution itself is hard to calculate. Therefore it is 
> probably hard to say how rugged the fitness landscape is 
> dependent on changes in the genotype, because the fitness 
> is an unpredictable emergent property of the whole system, 
> including the environment. 
> 
> One recent concept in this area seems to be "Epistasis" 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistasis
> 
> Epistasis and Shapes 
> of Fitness Landscapes http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio.PE/0603034 
> 
> -J.
> 
> 
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