Evolutionary Design in Embryogeny

Abstract

In biology texts embryogeny is defined as “the development or production of an embryo.” An embryo is a living creature in its first stage of life, from the fertilized egg cell through the initial development of its morphology and its chemical networks. The study of embryogeny is part of developmental biology [1, 2]. The reader may wonder why a book on evolutionary design should have a section on embryogeny. Computational embryogeny is the study of representations for evolutionary computation that mimic biological embryogeny. These representations contain analogs to the complex biological processes that steer a single cell to become a rose, a mouse, or a man. The advantage of using embryogenic representations is their richness of expression. A small seed of information can be expanded, through a developmental process, into a complex and potentially useful object. This richness of expression comes at a substantial price: the developmental process is sufficiently complex to be unpredictable.