2023/03/25 by Trevor McCourt, Ila Fiete, McCourt, Trevor +3 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO) #Evolution and Genetic Dynamics #Evolutionary Algorithms and Applications #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Gene Regulatory Network Analysis #Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC) #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.14448
openalex publication_date 2023/03/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Noise is a ubiquitous feature of the physical world. As a result, the first prerequisite of life is fault tolerance: maintaining integrity of state despite external bombardment. Recent experimental advances have revealed that biological systems achieve fault tolerance by implementing mathematically intricate error-correcting codes and by organizing in a modular fashion that physically separates functionally distinct subsystems. These elaborate structures represent a vanishing volume in the massive genetic configuration space. How is it possible that the primitive process of evolution, by which all biological systems evolved, achieved such unusual results? In this work, through experiments in Boolean networks, we show that the simultaneous presence of error correction and modularity in biological systems is no coincidence. Rather, it is a typical co-occurrence in noisy dynamic systems undergoing evolution. From this, we deduce the principle of error correction enhanced evolvability: systems possessing error-correcting codes are more effectively improved by evolution than those without.