Towards an evolutionary-developmental approach for real-world substrates

Extending “body-brain” evolution to the real-world presen ts a number of difficulties due to conflicting idealizations between evolutionary and constructional models. Toward addressing this gap, we develop a simple model system to analyze the effects of undoing these idealizations. Prelimin ary experiments with this system show that high variability developmental substrates can influence evolutionary dynamic s by causing ambiguities in selection. Furthermore the substrate can enable the evolution of adaptive responses to non deterministic developmental effects.