Role of Morphogenetic Competency on Evolution

The relationship between intelligence and evolution is bidirectional: while evolution can help evolve intelligences, the degree of intelligence itself can impact evolution (Baldwin, 1896). In the field of Evolutionary Computation, the inverse relationship (impact of intelligence on evolution) is approached from the perspective of organism level behaviour (Hinton, 1996). We extend these ideas to the developmental (cellular morphogenetic) level in the context of an expanded view of intelligence as not only the ability of a system to navigate the three-dimensional world, but also as the ability to navigate other arbitrary spaces (transcriptional, anatomical, physiological, etc.). Here, we specifically focus on the intelligence of a minimal model of a system navigating anatomical morphospace, and assess how the degree and manner of problem solving competency during morphogenesis effects evolutionary dynamics. To this end, we evolve populations of artificial embryos using a standard genetic algorithm in silico. Artificial embryos were cellular collectives given the capacity to undergo morphogenetic rearrangement (e.g., regulative development) prior to selection within an evolutionary cycle. Results from our model indicates that morphogenetic competency significantly alters evolutionary dynamics, with evolution preferring to improve anatomical intelligence rather than perfect the structural genes. These observations hint that evolution in the natural world may be leveraging the problem solving competencies of cells at multiple scales to boost evolvability and robustness to novel conditions. We discuss implications of our results for the Developmental Biology and Artificial Life communities.