The NK fitness landscape is a well-known model with which to study evolutionary dynamics in landscapes of different ruggedness. However, the model is static, and genomes are typically small, allowing observations over only a short adaptive period. Here we introduce an extension to the model that allows the experimenter to set the velocity at which the landscape changes independently from other parameters, such as the ruggedness or the mutation rate. We find that, similar to the previously observed complexity catastrophe, where evolution comes to a halt when environments become too complex due to overly high degrees of epistasis, here the same phenomenon occurs when changes happen too rapidly. Our expanded model also preserves essential properties of the static NK landscape, allowing for proper comparisons between static and dynamic landscapes.

Natural evolution keeps inventing new complex and intricate forms and behaviors. Digital evolution and genetic algorithms fail to create the same kind of complexity, not just because we still lack the computational resources to rival nature, but because (it has been argued) we have not understood in principle how to create open-ended evolving systems. Much effort has been made to define such open-endedness so as to create forms of increasing complexity indefinitely. Here, however, a simple evolving computational system that satisfies all such requirements is presented. Doing so reveals a shortcoming in the definitions for open-ended evolution. The goal to create models that rival biological complexity remains. This work suggests that our current definitions allow for even simple models to pass as open-ended, and that our definitions of complexity and diversity are more important for the quest of open-ended evolution than the fact that something runs indefinitely.

The role of historical contingency in the origin of life is one of the great unknowns in modern science. Only one example of life exists—one that proceeded from a single self-replicating organism (or a set of replicating hypercycles) to the vast complexity we see today in Earth's biosphere. We know that emergent life has the potential to evolve great increases in complexity, but it is unknown if evolvability is automatic given any self-replicating organism. At the same time, it is difficult to test such questions in biochemical systems. Laboratory studies with RNA replicators have had some success with exploring the capacities of simple self-replicators, but these experiments are still limited in both capabilities and scope. Here, we use the digital evolution system Avida to explore the interplay between emergent replicators (rare randomly assembled self-replicators) and evolvability. We find that we can classify fixed-length emergent replicators in Avida into two classes based on functional analysis. One class is more evolvable in the sense of optimizing the replicators' replication abilities. However, the other class is more evolvable in the sense of acquiring evolutionary innovations. We tie this tradeoff in evolvability to the structure of the respective classes' replication machinery, and speculate on the relevance of these results to biochemical replicators.

We study complex networks in which the nodes are tagged with different colors depending on their function (colored graphs), using information theory applied to the distribution of motifs in such networks. We find that colored motifs can be viewed as the building blocks of the networks (much more than the uncolored structural motifs can be) and that the relative frequency with which these motifs appear in the network can be used to define its information content. This information is defined in such a way that a network with random coloration (but keeping the relative number of nodes with different colors the same) has zero color information content. Thus, colored motif information captures the exceptionality of coloring in the motifs that is maintained via selection. We study the motif information content of the C. elegans brain as well as the evolution of colored motif information in networks that reflect the interaction between instructions in genomes of digital life organisms. While we find that colored motif information appears to capture essential functionality in the C. elegans brain (where the color assignment of nodes is straightforward), it is not obvious whether the colored motif information content always increases during evolution, as would be expected from a measure that captures network complexity. For a single choice of color assignment of instructions in the digital life form Avida, we find rather that colored motif information content increases or decreases during evolution, depending on how the genomes are organized, and therefore could be an interesting tool to dissect genomic rearrangements.