Evolution of Complexity

Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version:

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That is, how does biological evolution affect the complexity of organisms? (Or assemblages of organisms, like ecologies?) Obviously, this is difficult to study well without a widely agreed-upon and biologically-appropriate complexity measure... (In fact, most of my "queries" under complexity measures relate to this issue.)

How different is "the evolution of complexity" from, e.g., "the evolution of size"? (Bonner, for one, suggests very plausibly that they are linked.)

See also:
• Complexity, Complex Systems
• Complexity Measures
• Developmental Biology
• Physical Principles and Biology

Recommended:
• John Tyler Bonner, On the Evolution of Complexity, by Means of Natural Selection
• T. H. Frazzetta, Complex Adaptations in Evolving Populations
• Carlos Gershenson, Tom Lenaerts, "Evolution of Complexity", arxiv:0710.3784 [Introduction to the special issue of Artificial Life edited by Carlos and Tom]
• Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution [Brief comments]
• Thomas Miconi, "Complexity and Evolution: The Double-Edged Sword", Artificial Life (forthcoming) [PDF]

To read:
• Raffaele Calabretta, "Duplication of modules facilitates the evolution of functional specialization," Artificial Life 6 (2000): 69--84 [online]
• Heather J. Goldsb, Anna Dornhaus, Benjamin Kerr, and Charles Ofria, "Task-switching costs promote the evolution of division of labor and shifts in individuality", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 109 (2012): 13686--13691
• Matthew D. Herron, Joshua M. Borin, Jacob C. Boswell, Jillian Walker, I-Chen Kimberly Chen, Charles A. Knox, Margrethe Boyd, Frank Rosenzweig and William C. Ratcliff, "De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation", Scientific Reports 9 (2019): 2328
• Daniel W. McShea and Robert N. Brandon, Biology's First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems
• David Milne, David Raup, John Billingham, Karl Niklaus and Kevin Padidan (eds.), The Evolution of Complex and Higher Organisms: A Report Prepared by the Participants of Workshops Held at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, July 1981, January 1982, and May 1982 [I should probably return the paper copy I was "loaned" in 1999 now that I have a download...]
• Max Shpak, Peter Stadler, Gunter Wagner and Lee Altenberg, "Simon-Ando Decomposability and Fitness Landscapes", q-bio.PE/0403030
• Orkun S. Soyer and Sebastian Bonhoeffer, "Evolution of complexity in signaling pathways", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103 (2006): 16337--16342
• Peter D. Turney, "A Simple Model of Unbounded Evolutionary Versatility as a Largest-Scale Trend in Organismal Evolution", Artificial Life 6 (2000): 109--128 = arxiv:cs.NE/0212021 [Thanks to Dr. Turney for pointing me to this paper]
• Gunter P. Wagner, Jane P. Kenney-Hunt, Mihaela Pavlicev, Joel R. Peck, David Waxman and James M. Cheverud, "Pleiotropic scaling of gene effects and the 'cost of complexity'", Nature 452 (2008): 470--472

Notebooks :