Evolution of Complexity

27 Feb 2017 16:30

That is, how does biological evolution affect the complexity of organisms? (Or assemblages of organisms, like ecologies?) Obviously, this is difficult to study well without a widely agreed-upon and biologically-appropriate complexity measure...

How different is "the evolution of complexity" from, e.g., "the evolution of size"? (Bonner, for one, suggests they are linked.)

See also: Developmental Biology

John Tyler Bonner, On the Evolution of Complexity, by Means of Natural Selection [Review]
T. H. Frazzetta, Complex Adaptations in Evolving Populations
Carlos Gershenson, Tom Lenaerts, "Evolution of Complexity", arxiv:0710.3784 [Introduction to the special issue of Artificial Life edited by Carlos and Tom]
Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order [Interesting, but the writing is confused. Favors intrinsic trends towards complexity, self-organization and "the edge of chaos." I am much more skeptical of some, but by no means all, of Kauffman's later work.]
Thomas Miconi, "Complexity and Evolution: The Double-Edged Sword", Artificial Life (forthcoming) [PDF]

Raffaele Calabretta, "Duplication of modules facilitates the evolution of functional specialization," Artificial Life 6 (2000): 69--84 [online]
Heather J. Goldsb, Anna Dornhaus, Benjamin Kerr, and Charles Ofria, "Task-switching costs promote the evolution of division of labor and shifts in individuality", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 109 (2012): 13686--13691
Max Shpak, Peter Stadler, Gunter Wagner and Lee Altenberg, "Simon-Ando Decomposability and Fitness Landscapes", q-bio.PE/0403030
Orkun S. Soyer and Sebastian Bonhoeffer, "Evolution of complexity in signaling pathways", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103 (2006): 16337--16342
Peter D. Turney, "A Simple Model of Unbounded Evolutionary Versatility as a Largest-Scale Trend in Organismal Evolution", Artificial Life 6 (2000): 109--128 = arxiv:cs.NE/0212021 [Thanks to Dr. Turney for pointing me to this paper]
Gunter P. Wagner, Jane P. Kenney-Hunt, Mihaela Pavlicev, Joel R. Peck, David Waxman and James M. Cheverud, "Pleiotropic scaling of gene effects and the 'cost of complexity'", Nature 452 (2008): 470--472