Many believe that an essential component for the discovery of the tremendous diversity in natural organisms was the evolution of evolvability, whereby evolution speeds up its ability to innovate by generating a more adaptive pool of offspring. One hypothesized mechanism for evolvability is developmental canalization, wherein certain dimensions of variation become more likely to be traversed and others are prevented from being explored (e.g., offspring tend to have similar-size legs, and mutations affect the length of both legs, not each leg individually). While ubiquitous in nature, canalization is rarely reported in computational simulations of evolution, which deprives us of in silico examples of canalization to study and raises the question of which conditions give rise to this form of evolvability. Answering this question would shed light on why such evolvability emerged naturally, and it could accelerate engineering efforts to harness evolution to solve important engineering challenges. In this article, we reveal a unique system in which canalization did emerge in computational evolution. We document that genomes entrench certain dimensions of variation that were frequently explored during their evolutionary history. The genetic representation of these organisms also evolved to be more modular and hierarchical than expected by chance, and we show that these organizational properties correlate with increased fitness. Interestingly, the type of computational evolutionary experiment that produced this evolvability was very different from traditional digital evolution in that there was no objective, suggesting that open-ended, divergent evolutionary processes may be necessary for the evolution of evolvability.

中文翻译：

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开放式交互式进化系统中运河化和可进化性的出现

许多人认为，发现自然生物的巨大多样性的一个重要组成部分是可进化性的进化，进化通过产生更具适应性的后代池来加速其创新能力。进化性的一种假设机制是发育渠道，其中某些维度的变异变得更有可能被遍历，而其他维度的变异则被阻止被探索（例如，后代往往具有相似大小的腿，并且突变影响两条腿的长度，而不是每条腿的长度腿单独）。虽然在自然界中无处不在，但在进化的计算模拟中很少报道运河化，这剥夺了我们研究运河化的计算机示例，并提出了哪些条件导致这种形式的进化性的问题。回答这个问题将阐明为什么这种可进化性自然出现，它可以加速工程努力，利用进化来解决重要的工程挑战。在本文中，我们揭示了一个独特的系统，其中运河化确实出现在计算进化中。我们记录了基因组在其进化历史中经常探索的某些变异维度。这些生物的遗传表征也进化为比偶然预期的更加模块化和层次化，我们表明这些组织特性与增加的适应性相关。有趣的是，产生这种可进化性的计算进化实验类型与传统的数字进化非常不同，因为没有目标，这表明开放式、