The evolutionary origins of hierarchy
Henok Mengistu, Joost Huizinga, Jean-Baptiste Mouret, and Jeff Clune

TL;DR
This paper demonstrates that connection costs in networks promote the evolution of hierarchical and modular structures, which enhance performance and adaptability, providing insights into biological and artificial network evolution.
Contribution
It reveals that connection costs drive the simultaneous evolution of hierarchy and modularity, improving network performance and evolvability in computational models.
Findings
Networks with connection costs evolve to be hierarchical and modular.
Hierarchical networks show higher performance and adaptability.
Hierarchy independently enhances evolvability beyond modularity.
Abstract
Hierarchical organization -- the recursive composition of sub-modules -- is ubiquitous in biological networks, including neural, metabolic, ecological, and genetic regulatory networks, and in human-made systems, such as large organizations and the Internet. To date, most research on hierarchy in networks has been limited to quantifying this property. However, an open, important question in evolutionary biology is why hierarchical organization evolves in the first place. It has recently been shown that modularity evolves because of the presence of a cost for network connections. Here we investigate whether such connection costs also tend to cause a hierarchical organization of such modules. In computational simulations, we find that networks without a connection cost do not evolve to be hierarchical, even when the task has a hierarchical structure. However, with a connection cost,…
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