Evolution of Complexity

20 Apr 2008 15:54

That is, how does biological evolution affect the complexity of organisms? (Or assemblages of organisms, like ecologies?) Obviously, this is difficult to study well without a widely agreed-upon and biologically-appropriate complexity measure...

How different is "the evolution of complexity" from, e.g., "the evolution of size"? (Bonner, for one, suggests they are linked.)

John Tyler Bonner, On the Evolution of Complexity, by Means of Natural Selection [Review]
T. H. Frazzetta, Complex Adaptations in Evolving Populations
Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order [Interesting, but the writing is confused. Favors intrinsic trends towards complexity, self-organization and "the edge of chaos." I am much more skeptical of some, but by no means all, of Stu's later work.]
Thomas Miconi, "Complexity and Evolution: The Double-Edged Sword", Artificial Life (forthcoming) [PDF]

Raffaele Calabretta, "Duplication of modules facilitates the evolution of functional specialization," Artificial Life 6 (2000): 69--84 [online]
Max Shpak, Peter Stadler, Gunter Wagner and Lee Altenberg, "Simon-Ando Decomposability and Fitness Landscapes", q-bio.PE/0403030
Orkun S. Soyer and Sebastian Bonhoeffer, "Evolution of complexity in signaling pathways", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103 (2006): 16337--16342
Gunter P. Wagner, Jane P. Kenney-Hunt, Mihaela Pavlicev, Joel R. Peck, David Waxman and James M. Cheverud, "Pleiotropic scaling of gene effects and the 'cost of complexity'", Nature 452 (2008): 470--472