From a "fossil" problem of recapitulation existence to computer simulation and answer

Title:

From a "fossil" problem of recapitulation existence to computer simulation and answer

Creator:

Gecow, Andrzej

Identifier:

https://cdk.lib.cas.cz/client/handle/uuid:0facec2b-0854-4ac9-8612-6e9306332d08
uuid:0facec2b-0854-4ac9-8612-6e9306332d08

Subject:

Adaptive evolution, change propagation, and terminal modifications

Type:

model:article and TEXT

Format:

bez média and svazek

Description:

Modern biology usually rejects the concept of recapitulation of phylogeny in ontogeny as describing a non-existent phenomenon and regards it as a "case closed". The minority of biologists (mainly paleontologists and older evolutionists) that recognize the phenomenon in their empirical observations, cannot provide a viable mechanism for it, except for referring to Darwin's and Schmalhasen's intuitions, lacking rigorous quantitative testability. Now a possibility arises to check this hypothesis and this is the theme of this paper. The paper presents an abstract model of complex system adaptive evolution and results of its computer simulations. The system is described as direct network similar to Kauffman's Boolean network. The model indicates that the "recapitulation" is a statistical phenomenon expected as a result of long adaptive evolution of a complex system and is a very good quantitative first approximation of evolutionary phenomena. The simulation successfully replicated the similarities of functional and historical sequence and other main regularities: Naef's "terminal modification and conservation of early stages" and Weismann's "terminal addition" as terminal predominance of addition over removal. These tendencies are observed upon reaching certain complexity threshold. Thus, now it will be a problem requiring explanation if we do not observe statistical recapitulation in a more complex ontogeny.

Language:

English

Rights:

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
policy:public

Source:

Neural network world: international journal on neural and mass-parallel computing and information systems | 2005 Volume:15 | Number:3

Harvested from:

CDK

Metadata only:

false