Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: A fundamental issue in evolution is the balance between variation and stability.Change is necessary for the evolution of fitter forms, but it cannot come at the expense of disrupting structures or processes that are critical to survival.The mechanisms that allow sufficient variation to occur while preserving critical features are, therefore, central to evolvabilitythe viability of the evolutionary process in a class of systems.Recent work in evolutionary developmental biology has demonstrated that modularity is the key enabler for balancing variation and stability in animals.The deployment of the same developmental modules in different spatial and temporal combinations (called heterotopy and heterochrony, respectively) can generate a wide range of forms without the need for much change within the modules.Thus, useful and sometimes critical features evolved with great difficulty can be conserved as modules, while large changes in the regulatory mechanisms underlying their use can provide the variation needed for evolution.In this thesis, we combine the idea of regulatory variation in a modular developmental system with Kauffmans hypothesis of cell types as attractors.We present a simple model for the ontogenesis of two-dimensional shapes an attractor network of regulatory genes controls the deployment of genetic network modules that explicitly determine growth and phenomenological attributes.We use this model to show that:
Author: Amer Ghanem
Institution: University of Cincinnati
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: University of Cincinnati
OpenAlex ID: W2600506136