Section: New Results

The evolutionary complexity ratchet

participants: G Beslon, V Liard, D Parsons, Jonathan Rouzaud-Cornabas

Using the in silico experimental evolution platform Aevol, we evolved populations of digital organisms in conditions where a simple functional structure is best.

Strikingly, we observed that in a large fraction of the simulations, organisms evolved a complex functional structure and that their complexity increased during evolution despite being a lot less fit than simple organisms in other populations. However, when submitted to a harsh mutational pressure, we observed that a significant proportion of complex individuals ended up with a simple functional structure.

Our results suggest the existence of a complexity ratchet that is powered by epistasis and that cannot be beaten by selection. They also show that this ratchet can be overthrown by robustness because of the strong constraints it imposes on the coding capacity of the genome.

This result has been published in the International conference ALife in Tokyo (July 2018) where it received the best paper award [28]