Skip to main content
European Commission logo
español español
CORDIS - Resultados de investigaciones de la UE
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary
Contenido archivado el 2024-05-30

The Evolution of Evolvability: How Natural Selection Shapes Itself

Objetivo

The objective of this research is to understand how a metabolic system undergoing natural selection can transform into a template-based system undergoing natural selection. This is an example of an early major transition in evolution. Answering this question will contribute to our understanding of the origin of life, the self-referential nature of embodied evolution, the evolution of evolvability, evolutionary algorithms in engineering, and combinatorial chemistry. We build upon our published papers on natural selection at the extremes: evolution of complex metabolic organizations by natural selection; and the evolution of non-enzymatic template replicators. We build a model that can bridge the gap between our previous two models. A new algebraic representation describes an abstract chemical structure to function map that can represent the behaviour of both autocatalytic metabolities undergoing macromutation, and nucleotide based templates undergoing micromutation. This unified model can then be simulated and explored to understand the transition from limited to unlimited heredity. We test the hypothesis that second-order selection (i.e. selection for variability properties) acting on metabolic organizations enclosed in compartments was the driving force for the evolution of nucleotides. Although the work is a natural and well-defined extension of our previous results, we believe it will produce the first model of a physically embodied evolutionary algorithm capable of open-ended evolution.

Convocatoria de propuestas

FP7-PEOPLE-2007-2-1-IEF
Consulte otros proyectos de esta convocatoria

Coordinador

COLLEGIUM BUDAPEST EGYESULET
Aportación de la UE
€ 74 573,20
Dirección
Szenpharonsag Utca 2
1014 BUDAPEST
Hungría

Ver en el mapa

Tipo de actividad
Research Organisations
Contacto administrativo
Eors Szathmary (Prof.)
Enlaces
Coste total
Sin datos