# Development necessitates evolutionarily conserved factors

## TL;DR

This paper shows that early generalised factors in development are evolutionarily conserved and function similarly in both biological and artificial systems.

## Contribution

The first demonstration of evolutionarily conserved factors emerging in an artificial developmental system.

## Key findings

- Hidden units in the NCA model show functional analogies to early biological developmental factors.
- Developmental strategies learned by the model can be reused for new body forms by conserving early factors.
- Evolutionary conservation of early factors may be a fundamental principle in development.

## Abstract

Early-stage generalised transcription factors in biological development are often evolutionarily conserved across species. Here, we find for the first time that similar factors functionally emerge in an alternative medium of development. Through comprehensively analysing a Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) model of morphogenesis, we find multiple properties of the hidden units that are functionally analogous to early factors in biological development. We test the generalisation abilities of our model through transfer learning of other morphologies and find that developmental strategies learnt by the model are reused to grow new body forms by conserving its early generalised factors. Our paper therefore provides evidence that nature did not become locked into one arbitrary method of developing multicellular organisms: the use of early generalised factors as fundamental control mechanisms and the resulting necessity for evolutionary conservation of those factors may be fundamental to development, regardless of the details of how development is implemented.