Elsevier Science
on
High quality submissions reporting original work in the area
of evolvability studies are invited for a special issue of
the journal Biosystems on the topic of Evolvability.
Darwinian evolution, characterized by heritable variation and selection, is
not by itself sufficient to account for the capacity to vary, the specific
type of variability present, nor for heritability of phenotypic fitness.
Rigidity of genotype-phenotype mappings, as often used in evolutionary
computation or population genetics, constrains the dynamics of evolution
to a small space of possible biological or artificial systems.
Open-ended evolution is not possible under such constraints.
Yet evolution, by itself, cannot fully explain the
advent of genetic systems, flexible genotype-phenotype mappings, and
heritable fitness. This presents a challenge both to biologists
seeking to understand the capacity of life to evolve and to computer
scientists who seek to harness biological-like robustness and openness
in the evolution of artificial systems. The sources of variability and
its transmission between generations have been identified as key
to biological evolvability. Properties such as the facilitation of
extradimensional bypass and robustness to genetic variability
(Conrad, 1990), heritability of fitness (Michod & Roze, 1999), modularity,
as well as robustness to developmental variation (Kirschner & Gerhart, 1998)
play important roles in evolvability.
References:
The main target disciplines for this issue are thus:
Evolutionary Computation: As workers in evolutionary computation know well,
the capacity to evolve "good" solutions is not an automatic by-product
of the use of evolutionary methods. They have however gained much experience
in the areas of genotype-phenotype mappings and variability operators
since these are aspects that must be designed in their systems. With the
increasing sophisicated of this field, researchers have begun to examine
what they could learn from (or perhaps teach) evolutionary biologists.
Evolutionary and Developmental Biology:
As described above in more detail, evolutionary biologists have
in recent years come to see that evolvability is not sufficiently well
understood, and this is now, in fact, regarded as major problem for the
theory of evolution that may require substantial extensions and
refinement of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Workers in developmental and
evolutionary biology, and genetic systems have begun to attack
the problem of biological evolvability
using newer theoretical tools as well as evidence from
growing knowledge of genetic regulatory control and its evolutionary
history.
Properties such as the facilitation of
extradimensional bypass and robustness to phenotypic and genetic variability
have been identified as playing special, if not well-understand, roles.
Software Engineering: Variational properties of software systems
as they change and are maintained over time have been the key issue
in finding principles and methodologies for developing adaptable software.
Analogues of biological evolvability are needed for large software
systems such as telecommunications networking software in order to
manage the complexity of system requirements change over time. The
relationship between biosystems and software systems is strengthening
with the recent growing awareness of deep parallels and with new research
into the evolvability principles that seem to be common to both.
However, submissions that do not focus on
evolvablility will be rejected.
Topics that focus on Evolvability might relate to such issues as :
Authors are invited to submit 3 hardcopies of full papers of high
scientific quality reporting original research in the area of
evolvability to the guest editor at the address below.
Format and Length of Submissions:
Submissions are limited to approximately 10,000 words (or about 20 journal
pages); however, many submissions might be of much shorter length.
One page of figures counts as 600 words, twenty references as 300
words, sections headings correspond to 20 words (3 lines); as a
guideline: 8 double-spaced pages (1 inch margins) in Times 12pt
corresponds to 4 journal pages.
All papers
considered for the special issue will be judged first for
appropriateness to the topic, and if this is satisfactory,
will then, without exception, be strictly and anonymously
refereed by at least two peer reviewers.
All submissions will be acknowledge and reviewed.
Decisions on acceptance,
rejection, or provisional acceptance subject to revisions will be
given in the notification to authors according to the schedule below
and are subject to final approval by the editor-in-chief.
Important Dates:
Please mail all submissions to the guest editor at
the address below.
Biosystems On-Line:
Guest editor:
Dr. Chrystopher L. Nehaniv - BIOSYSTEMS
e-mail: C.L.Nehaniv@herts.ac.uk
Special Issue URL:
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/biosystems/
EVOLVABILITY
The little understood capacity, observed in the history of evolution
of life on earth, to be able to reach "good" solutions via evolution is
called `Evolvability', and we seek to characterize, understand and
apply it. Evolvability has been variously defined as the capacity of a
population to produce variants fitter than any yet existing (Altenberg, 1994),
the "genome's ability to produce adaptive variants when acted on by the
genetic system" (Wagner & Altenberg, 1996), as the
"capacity to generate heritable phenotypic variation" (Kirschner &
Gerhart, 1998); and as characterized by
"evolutionary watersheds" opening the "floodgates to future evolution",
such as segmentation and body plans (Dawkins, 1989).
Until the 1990's biologists had generally been concerned about the
fate of variation rather than its origin, tacitly assuming that
the origin and maintenance of variability was an automatic by-product
of Darwinian evolution. Experiments with computational or simple
organic evolutionary systems show emphatically that this need not be the case,
and the resulting explanatory gap now poses a serious challenge for
evolutionary theory. Currently evolutionary biology can say little more than
that these properties arose somehow in the course of organic evolution
on earth, therefore interest in this topic is now very high.
Target Research Communities:
The motivation for this special issue follows upon the growing excitement
from academia, industry, and research communities about the importance of
a capacity to vary robustly over time or over generations in digital and
natural systems. This is exemplified by the Santa Fe Institute's formation
of a working group on evolvability in April 2000, symposia on Evolvability
at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference in 1999 and at
the International Conference on Artificial Life in August 2000. Moreover,
the British Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has
just funded a 3-year network for the the study of evolvability in biological
and software systems to integrate research links between disciplines
(Evolutionary Biology, Developmental Biology, Genetics, Evolutionary
Computation, Computer Science, Robotics, Telecommunications,
Software Engineering) where evolvability phenomena play an increasingly
important role. This proposed special issue is primarily aimed to bring
together research work from these various disciplines to better understand
the nature of evolvability and the mechanisms that do or could support
it in biology (organic and constructive), evolutionary computation,
and software systems and applications.
Submissions:
Authors are requested to contact the guest editor as soon as
possible regarding the appropriateness, formatting and length
of their planned submissions.
Formating of submissions must be strictly according to Biosystems
rules as specified at in the Guide for Authors at:
http://www.elsevier.com:80/inca/publications/store/5/0/6/0/1/7/,
except that submissions should be sent directly to
the guest editor at the address below.
31 March 2001 - Submitted Manuscripts Due (3 hardcopies and electronic form)
June 2001 - Notification to Authors (Delayed to end of July 2001)
1 Sept 2001 - Final Manuscripts Due (3 hardcopies and electronic form on
disk)
For a limited time (until 1st December 2000),
the Biosystems journal
is freely accessible on-line at:
http://www.elsevier.nl/inca/publications/store/5/0/6/0/1/7/index.htt
Director, U.K. EPSRC Network for Evolvability in Biological & Software Systems
Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences
University of Hertfordshire
College Lane
Hatfield Herts AL10 9AB
United Kingdom
phone: +44-1707-284-470
fax: +44-1707-284-303
www:
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/welcome.html