Embryology in Tierra: A study of a genotype to phenotype map

Ecolab9, 7] is a model system of an ecology that attempts to understand evolutionary processes. It makes a particular assumption about the embryology, or genotype-phenotype map in order to generate the novel ecological interaction coeecients from the novel genotypes as they arise through mutation. The Eco-Tierra projectt7] examines this assumption using Tierra2] as a model ecosystem, which has an implicitly deened embryology. Ecolab9, 7] is a model system of an ecology that attempts to understand evolutionary processes. Ecolab's dynamics is taken to be a generalised form of the Lotka-Volterra equation, which is in fact the most general analytic two-term interaction model. _ n = r n + n n + mutate(; r; n): (1) Here n is the population density, the component n i being the number of individuals of species i, r is the diierence between reproduction and death, is the interaction matrix, with ij being the interaction between species i and j, and mutate is the mutation operator. is used to denote elementwise multiplication of two vectors. The mutation operator must generate new degrees of freedom i > n sp (where n sp is the number of species currently in the ecology), somehow deening the new 1