Noisy dynamical systems evolve error correcting codes and modularity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that noisy dynamical systems naturally develop error-correcting codes and modularity, which enhances their evolvability, providing insights into biological fault tolerance mechanisms.

Contribution

It reveals that error correction and modularity co-occur in evolving noisy systems, establishing a principle that error correction improves evolvability.

Findings

Error correction and modularity co-occur in biological systems.

Systems with error-correcting codes evolve more effectively.

Experimental evidence from Boolean networks supports the principle.

Abstract

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.