REHOVOT, Israel, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- A complex Israeli study has determined the pace of evolution increases when evolutionary goals are continuously changed.
Nadav Kashtan, Elad Noor and Professor Uri Alon of the Weizmann Institute created computer simulations mimicking natural evolution that occurs during millions of years.
In the simulations, a population of digital genomes evolves over time toward a given goal: to maximize fitness under certain conditions. Genomes better adapted to their environment may survive to the next generation or reproduce more prolifically. But achieving even simple goals might take thousands of generations, raising the question of whether the some 3 billion years since life appeared on Earth was long enough to evolve the diversity and complexity existing today,
Since evolution takes place under changing environmental conditions, forcing organisms to continually adapt would, at least intuitively, slow the process, the researchers said.. But when they created a simulation that repeatedly changed the goals, evolution actually increased speed and the more complex the goals, the faster evolution accelerated.
The scientists said their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shed light on theoretical evolutionary questions and might have practical implications by providing a way to accelerate optimization algorithms.
