The gene-interaction networks of easy fitness landscapes
July 13, 2019 Leave a comment
Since evolutionary fitness landscapes have been a recurrent theme on TheEGG, I want to return, yet again, to the question of finding local peaks in fitness landscapes. In particular, to the distinction between easy and hard fitness landscapes.
Roughly, in easy landscapes, we can find local peaks quickly and in hard ones, we cannot. But this is very vague. To be a little more precise, I have to borrow the notion of orders of growth from the asymptotic analysis standard in computer science. A family of landscapes indexed by a size n (usually corresponding to the number of genes in the landscape) is easy if a local fitness optimum can be found in the landscapes in time polynomial in n and hard otherwise. In the case of hard landscapes, we can’t guarantee to find a local fitness peak and thus can sometimes reason from a state of perpetual maladaptive disequilibrium.
In Kaznatcheev (2019), I introduced this distinction to biology. Since hard landscapes have more interesting properties which are more challenging to theoretical biologist’s intuitions, I focused more on this. This was read — perhaps rightly — as me advocating for the existence or ubiquity of hard landscapes. And that if hard landscapes don’t occur in nature then my distinction is pointless. But I don’t think this is the most useful reading.
It certainly would be fun if hard landscapes were a feature of nature since they give us a new way to approach certain puzzles like the maintenance of cooperation, the evolution of costly learning, or open-ended evolution. But this is an empirical question. What isn’t a question is that hard landscape are a feature of our mental and mathematical models of evolution. As such, all — or most, whatever that means — fitness landscapes being easy is still exciting for me. It means that the easy vs hard distinction can push us to refine our mental models such that if only easy landscapes occur in nature then our models should only be able to express easy landscapes.
In other words, using computational complexity to build upper-bounds arguments (that on certain classes of landscapes, local optima can be found efficiently) can be just as fun as lower-bounds arguments (that on certain classes of landscapes, evolution requires at least a super-polynomial effort to find any local fitness peak). However, apart from a brief mention of smooth landscapes, I did not stress the upper-bounds in Kaznatcheev (2019).
Now, together with David Cohen and Peter Jeavons, I’ve taken this next step — at least in the cstheory context, we still need to write on the biology. So in this post, I want to talk briefly about a biological framing of Kaznatcheev, Cohen & Jeavons (2019) and the kind of fitness landscapes that are easy for evolution.
Fighting about frequency and randomly generating fitness landscapes
June 22, 2019 by Artem Kaznatcheev 8 Comments
A couple of months ago, I was in Cambridge for the Evolution Evolving conference. It was a lot of fun, and it was nice to catch up with some familiar faces and meet some new ones. My favourite talk was Karen Kovaka‘s “Fighting about frequency”. It was an extremely well-delivered talk on the philosophy of science. And it engaged with a topic that has been very important to discussions of my own recent work. Although in my case it is on a much smaller scale than the general phenomenon that Kovaka was concerned with,
Let me first set up my own teacup, before discussing the more general storm.
Recently, I’ve had a number of chances to present my work on computational complexity as an ultimate constraint on evolution. And some questions have repeated again and again after several of the presentations. I want to address one of these persistent questions in this post.
How common are hard fitness landscapes?
This question has come up during review, presentations, and emails (most recently from Jianzhi Zhang’s reading group). I’ve spent some time addressing it in the paper. But it is not a question with a clear answer. So unsurprisingly, my comments have not been clear. Hence, I want to use this post to add some clarity.
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Filed under Commentary, Models, Preliminary Tagged with algorithmic philosophy, Biology, evolution, fitness landscapes, metamodeling, philosophy of science