Hoxful Monsters

The ability of organisms to generate novel characters is one of the long standing puzzle in the theory of evolution.Recent work in the field of Genetics, Evolution and Developmental biology have led to some finds suggesting that organisms have facilitated variation, a design whereby random genetic changes result in novel characteristics (phenotypes) that could be useful.

According to new study by Merav Parter, Nadav Kashtan and Uri Alon from Weizmann Institute indicate that the evolution of novel characteristics within organisms can be enhanced when environments change in a systematic manner.Results published in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology clearly suggest that in environments that vary over time in a non-random way, evolution can learn the rules of the environment and develop organisms that can readily generate novel useful traits with only a few mutations.

To check their hypothesis, the group employed computer simulations of evolution of simple computational ‘organisms’.

Read the entire article on PLos website.

Citation and Image credit: Parter M, Kashtan N, Alon U (2008) Facilitated Variation: How Evolution Learns from Past Environments To Generalize to New Environments. PLoS Comput Biol 4(11): e1000206. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000206