Spontaneous Emergence of Modularity in a Model of Evolving Individuals

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how modularity can spontaneously emerge in evolving populations as a response to environmental change and noise, highlighting its potential role in natural hierarchical structures.

Contribution

It shows that modularity arises naturally in evolving populations due to environmental pressures and horizontal gene transfer, without explicit design.

Findings

Modularity correlates with environmental change severity and speed.

Modularity emerges as a response to environmental noise.

Hierarchical structures may result from evolution in changing environments.

Abstract

We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of modularity correlates with the rapidity and severity of environmental change. The modularity arises as a synergistic response to the noise in the environment in the presence of horizontal gene transfer. We suggest that the hierarchical structure observed in the natural world may be a broken symmetry state, which generically results from evolution in a changing environment.