Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvability Without the Pressure to Adapt
Joel Lehman, Kenneth O. Stanley

TL;DR
This paper demonstrates that evolvability can increase over time without adaptive pressure, driven by heritable drift and niche accumulation, as shown through simulated models.
Contribution
It introduces a novel explanation that increasing evolvability arises passively from genotypic drift and niche dynamics, without the need for adaptive pressure.
Findings
Evolvability can increase without selection pressure.
Heritable drift biases phenotypic distributions towards higher evolvability.
Simulated models support the passive increase of evolvability over time.
Abstract
Why evolvability appears to have increased over evolutionary time is an important unresolved biological question. Unlike most candidate explanations, this paper proposes that increasing evolvability can result without any pressure to adapt. The insight is that if evolvability is heritable, then an unbiased drifting process across genotypes can still create a distribution of phenotypes biased towards evolvability, because evolvable organisms diffuse more quickly through the space of possible phenotypes. Furthermore, because phenotypic divergence often correlates with founding niches, niche founders may on average be more evolvable, which through population growth provides a genotypic bias towards evolvability. Interestingly, the combination of these two mechanisms can lead to increasing evolvability without any pressure to out-compete other organisms, as demonstrated through experiments…
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