"In this paper, we present what is ostensibly the first quantitative experimental evidence, since Wallace's original proposal, that nature employs evolutionary control strategies to maximize the fitness of biological networks," Chakrabarti said.
The scientists are working on formulating a new general theory based on this finding they are calling "evolutionary control". The work is likely to provoke a considerable amount of thinking, according to Charles Smith, a historian of science at Western Kentucky University.
Conceptual and quantitative models that integrate rather than independently examine thermodynamic, stoichiometric and evolutionary controls on biogeochemical cycling are essential for understanding local to global biogeochemical patterns.
Her current focus as Chief Innovation Officer at Introspective Systems is to explore new ways to apply these skills to provide adaptive and evolutionary control systems in the optimization of sustainable environments and communities.
Mutation rate variability is a key theme in current discussions of the need for an extended evolutionary synthesis [14], [15] under the name of "the evolution of evolvability", the tantalizingly recursive possibility that the ability of organisms to evolve is itself a trait, or spectrum of traits, under evolutionary control [16] [19].
Should it really turn out that the non-specific component of protein-protein interactions is functionally relevant, and therefore also under evolutionary control, this would represent a major paradigm shift, and would carry important implications on how we view biological systems on the molecular level or try to affect them in practical situations.
This finding motivates a setup where several hierarchical stages are employed, and the explicity of evolutionary control rises towards more coarse stages, such that e.g. in the four cell stage, a direct coding could be used, in the 16 cell stage a vector field with allometry, and in a subsequent, 64 cell stage a vector field only.
Furthermore, there is also emerging new experimental evidence [ 8] that the lag-phase is under evolutionary control and is linked to stochastic effects of gene expression.
Very few of the behavioral mutations studied in C. elegans labs are convincing candidates for a useful setting on the evolutionary control panel.
While possibly a contributing factor, delays are unlikely to be an exhaustive explanation because the length of the lag-phase appears to be, at least partially, under evolutionary control, as discussed in the ' Background' section.
The presence of KLHL9, which appears to be under different evolutionary constraints than IFNW and IFNA, close to IFNA/IFNW cluster 2 suggested the cluster as whole might be under different evolutionary control than cluster 1 or 3. Evolutionary divergence rates do not indicate that this is the case, however (Table 3).
