## Evolving viable systems

It got cold really, really quickly today… Winter is coming  –GRRM

In my last two posts I wrote about holey adaptive landscapes and some criticisms I had for the existing model. In this post, I will motivate the hijacking of the model for my own purposes, for macroevolution :-) That’s the great thing about models, by relabeling the ingredients something else, as long as the relationship between elements of the model holds true, we may suddenly have an entirley fresh insight about the world!

As we might recall, the holey adaptive landscapes model proposes that phenotypes are points in n-dimensional space, where n is a very large number. If each phenotype was  a node, then mutations that change one phenotype to another can be considered edges. In this space for large enough n, even nodes with very rare properties can percolate and form a giant connected cluster. Gavrilets, one of the original authors of the model and its main proponent, considered this rare property to be high fitness. This way, evolution never has to cross fitness valleys. However, I find this unlikely; high fitness within a particular environment is a very rare property. If the property is sufficiently rare, then even if the nodes form a giant connected cluster, if the connections between nodes are sufficiently tenuous, then there is not enough time and population size for their exploration.

Think of a blind fruitfly banging its head within a sphere. On the wall of the sphere is pricked a single tiny hole just large enough for the fruitfly to escape. How much time will it take for the fruitfly to escape? The question clearly depends on the size of the sphere. In n-dimensions, where n is large, the sphere is awfully big. Now consider the sphere to be a single highly fit phenotype, and a hole is an edge to another highly fit phenotype. The existence of the hole is not sufficient to guarantee that the fruitfly will find the exit in finite time. In fact, even a giant pack of fruitflies — all the fruitflies that ever existed — may not be able to find it, given all the time that life has evolved on Earth. That’s how incredibly large the sphere is — the exit must not only exist, it must be sufficiently common.

The goal of this post is to detail why I’m so interested in the holey adaptive landscapes model. I’m interested in its property of historicity, the capacity to be contingent and irreversible. I will define these terms more carefully later. Gavrilets has noted this in his book, but I can find no insightful exploration of this potential. I hope this model can formalize some intuitions gained in complex adaptive systems, particularly those of evo-devo and my personal favorite pseudo-philosophical theory, generative entrenchment (also here and here). Gould had a great instinct for this when he argued for the historical contingency of evolutionary process (consider his work on gastropods, for example, or his long rants on historicity in his magnus opus — although I despair to pick out a specific section).

Before I go on, I must also rant. Gould’s contingency means that evolution is sensitive to initial conditions, yes, this does not mean history is chaotic, in the mathematical sense of chaos. Chaos is not the only way for a system to be sensitive to initial conditions, in fact, mathematical chaos is preeminently ahistorical — just like equilibriating systems, chaotic systems forget history in a hurry, in total contrast to what Gould meant, which is that history should leave an indelible imprint on all of future. No matter what the initial condition, chaotic systems settle in the same strange attractor, the same distribution over phase space. The exact trajectory depends on initial condition, yes, but because the smallest possible difference in initial condition quickly translates to a completely different trajectory, it means that no matter how you begin, you future is… chaotic. Consider two trajectories that began with very differently, the future difference between those two trajectories is no greater than two trajectories that began with the slightest possible difference. The difference in the difference of initial conditions is quickly obliviated by time. Whatever the atheist humanists say, chaos gives no more hope to free will than quantum mechanics. Lots of people seem to have gone down this hopeless route, not least of which is Michael Shermer, who, among many different places, writes here:

And as chaos and complexity theory have shown, small changes early in a historical sequence can trigger enormous changes later… the question is: what type of change will be triggered by human actions, and in what direction will it go?

If he’s drawing this conclusion from chaos theory, then the answer to his question is… we don’t know, we can’t possibly have an idea, and it doesn’t matter what we do, since all trajectories are statistically the same. If he’s drawing this conclusion from “complexity theory” — not yet a single theory with core results of any sort, then it’s a theory entirely unknown to me.

No, interesting historical contingency is quite different, we will see if the holey landscapes model can more accurately capture its essence.

Things in the holey landscapes model get generally better if we consider the rare property to be viability, instead of high fitness. In fact, Gavrilets mixes use of “viable” and highly fit, although I suspect him to always mean the latter. By viable, I mean that the phenotype is capable of reproduction in some environment, but I don’t care how well it reproduces. For ease of discussion, let’s say that viable phenotypes also reproduce above the error threshold, and there exist an environment where it is able to reproduce with absolute fitness >1. Else, it’s doomed to extinction in all environments, and then it’s not very viable, is it?

It turns out that the resultant model contains an interesting form of irreversibility. I will give the flavor here, while spending the next post being more technical. Consider our poor blind fruitfly, banging its head against the sphere. Because we consider viability instead of “high fitness”, there are now lots of potential holes in the sphere. Each potential hole is a neighboring viable phenotype, but the hole is opened or closed by the environment, which dictates whether that neighboring viable phenotype is fit.

Aha, an astute reader might say, but this is no better than Gavrilets’ basic model. The number of open holes at any point must be very small, since it’s also subject to the double filter of viability and high fitness. How can we find the open holes?

The difference is that after an environmental change, the sphere we are currently in might be very unfit. Thus, the second filter — high fitness — is much less constrictive, since it merely has to be fitter than the current sphere, which might be on the verge of extinction. A large porportion of viable phenotypes may be “open” holes, as opposed to the basic model, where only the highly fit phenotypes are open. Among viable phenotypes, highly fit ones may be rare, but those that are somewhat more fit than an exceedingly unfit phenotype may be much more common — and it’s only a matter of time, often fairly short time on the geological scale, before any phenotype is rendered exceedingly unfit. So you see, in this model evolution also did not have to cross a fitness valley, but I’m using a much more classical mechanism — peak shifts due to environmental change, rather than a percolation cluster of highly-fit phenotypes.

Now that our happier fruitfly is in the neighboring sphere, what is the chance that it will return to its previous sphere, as opposed to choosing some other neighbor? The answer is… very low. The probability of finding any particular hole has not improved, and verges on impossibility; although the probability of finding some hole is much better. Moreover, the particular hole that the fruitfly went through dictate what holes it will have access to next — and if it can’t return to its previous sphere, then it can’t go back to remake the choice. This gives the possibility of much more interesting contingency than mere chaos.

This mechanism has much in common with Muller’s Ratchet, or Dollo’s Law, and is an attempt to generalize the ratchet mechanism while formalizing what we mean, exactly, by irreversibility. I will tighten the argument next Thursday.

## Criticisms of holey adaptive landscapes

:-) My cats say hello.

In my last post I wrote about holey adaptive landscapes, a model of evolution in very high dimensional space where there is no need to jump across fitness valleys. The idea is that if we consider the phenotype of organisms to be points in  n-dimensional space, where n is some large number (say, tens of thousands, as in the number of our genes), then high fitness phenotypes easily percolate even if they are rare. By percolate, I mean that most high-fitness phenotypes are connected in one giant component, so evolution from one high fitness “peak” to another does not involve crossing a valley, rather, there are only high fitness ridges that are well-connected. This is why the model is consider “holey”, highly fit phenotypes are entirely connected within the fitness landscape, but they run around large “holes” of poorly fit phenotypes that seem to be carved out from the landscape.

This is possible because as n (the number of dimensions) increases, the number of possible mutants that any phenotype can become also increases. The actual rate of increase depends on the model of mutation and can be linear, if we consider n to be the number of genes, or exponential, if we consider n to be the number of independent but continuous traits that characterize an organism. Once the number of possible mutants become so large that all highly fit phenotypes have, on average, another highly fit phenotype as neighbor, then percolation is assured.

More formally, we can consider the basic model where highly fit phenotypes are randomly distributed over phenotype space: any phenotype has probability $p_\omega$ of being highly fit. Let $S_m$ be the average size of the set of all mutants of any phenotype. For example, if n is the number of genes and the only mutations we consider are the loss-of-function of single genes, then $S_m$ is simply n, since this is the number of genes that can be lost, and therefore is the number of possible mutants. Percolation is reached if $S_m>\dfrac{1}{p_\omega}$. Later extensions also consider cases where highly fit phenotypes exist in clusters and showed that percolation is still easily achievable (Gavrilets’ book Origin of Species, Gravner et al.)

I have several criticisms of the basic model. As an aside, I find criticism to be the best way we can honor any line of work, it means we see a potential worthy of a great deal of thought and improvement. I’ll list my criticisms in the following:

1) We have not a clue what $p_\omega$ is, not the crudest ball-park idea. To grapple with this question, we must understand  what makes an admissible phenotype. For example, we certainly should not consider any combination of atoms to be a phenotype. The proper way to define an admissible phenotypes is by defining the possible operations (mutations) that move us from one phenotype to another, that is, we must define what is a mutation. If only DNA mutations are admissible operations, and if the identical DNA string produces the same phenotype in all environments (both risible assumptions, but let’s start here), then the space of all admissible phenotypes are all possible strings of DNA. Let us consider only genomes of a billion letters in length. This space is, of course, $4^{10^9}$. What fraction of these combinations are highly fit? The answers must be a truly ridiculously small number. So small that if $S_m\approx O(n)$, I would imagine that there is no way that highly fit phenotypes reach percolation.

Now, if $S_m\approx O(a^n)$, that is a wholly different matter altogether. For example, Gravner et al. argued that $a\approx 2$ for continuous traits in a simple model. If n is in the tens of thousands, my intuition tells me it’s possible that higly fit phenotypes reach percolation, since exponentials make really-really-really big numbers really quickly. Despite well known evidence that humans really are terrible intuiters at giant and tiny numbers, the absence of fitness valleys becomes at least plausible. But… it might not matter, because:

2) Populations have finite size, and evolution moves in finite time. Thus, the number of possible mutants that any phenotype will in fact explore is linear in population size and time (even if those that it can potentially explore is much larger). Even if the number of mutants, $S_m$ grows exponentially with n, it doesn’t matter if we never have enough population or time to explore that giant number of mutants. Thus, it doesn’t matter that highly fit phenotypes form a percolating cluster, if the ridges that connect peaks aren’t thick enough to be discovered. Not only must there be highly-fit neighbors, but in order for evolution to never have to cross fitness valleys, highly-fit neighbors must be common enough to be discovered. Else, if everything populations realistically discover are low fitness, then evolution has to cross fitness valleys anyway.

How much time and population is realistic? Let’s consider bacteria, which number in the $5\times 10^{30}$. In terms of generation time, let’s say they divide once every twenty minutes, the standard optimal laboratory doubling time for E. Coli. Most bacteria in natural conditions have much slower generation time. Then if bacteria evolved 4.5 billion years ago, we have had approximately 118260000000000, or ~$1.2\times 10^{14}$ generations. The total number of bacteria sampled across all evolution is therefore on the order of $6\times 10^{44}$. Does that sound like a large number? Because it’s not. That’s the trouble with linear growth. Against $4^{10^9}$, this is nothing. Even against $2^{10000}$ (where we consider $10000$ to be n, the dimension number), $6\times 10^{44}$ is nothing. That is, we simply don’t have time to test all the mutants. Highly fit phenotypes better make up more than $\dfrac{1}{6\times 10^{44}}$ of the phenotype space, else we’ll never discover it. Is $\dfrac{1}{6\times 10^{44}}$ small? Yes. Is it small enough? I’m not sure. Possibly not. In any case, this is the proper number to consider, not, say, $2^{10000}$. The fact that $S_m\approx O(a^n)$ is so large is a moot point.

3) My last criticism I consider the most difficult one for the model to answer. The holey adaptive landscapes model does not take into account environmental variation. To a great extent, it confuses the viable with the highly fit. In his book, Gavrilets often use the term “viable”, but if we use the usual definition of viable — that is, capable of reproduction, then clearly most viable phenotypes are not highly fit. Different viable phenotypes might be highly fit under different environmental conditions, but fitness itself has little meaning outside of a particular environment.

A straightforward inclusion of environmental conditions into this model is not easy. Let us consider the basic model to apply to viable phenotypes, that is, strings of DNA that are capable of reproduction, under some environment. Let us say that all that Gavrilets et al. has to say are correct with respect to viable phenotypes, that they form a percolating cluster, etc. Now, in a particular environment, these viable phenotypes will have different fitness. If we further consider only the highly fit phenotypes within a certain environment, for these highly fit phenotypes to form a percolating cluster, it would mean we would have to apply the reasoning of the model a second time. It would mean that all viable phenotypes must be connected to so many other viable phenotypes that among them would be another highly fit phenotype. Here, we take “highly fit” to be those viable phenotypes that have relative fitness greater than $1-\epsilon$, where the fittest phenotype has relative fitness $1$. This further dramatizes the inability of evolution to strike on “highly fit” phenotypes through a single mutation in realistic population size and time, since we must consider not $p_\omega$, but $p_v\times p_\omega$, where $p_v$ is the probability of being viable and $p_\omega$ is the probability of being highly fit. Both of these probabilities are almost certainly astronomically small, making the burden on the impoverishingly small number of $6\times 10^{44}$ even heavier.

It’s my belief, then, that in realistic evolution with finite population and time, fitness valleys nevertheless have to be crossed. Eithere there are no highly fit phenotypes a single mutation away, or if such mutations exist, then the space of all possible mutations is so large as to be impossible to fully sample with finite population and time. The old problem of having to cross fitness valleys is not entirely circumvented by the holey adaptive landscapes approach.

Next Thursday, I will seek to hijack this model for my own uses, as a model of macroevolution.

Hello world :-)

My research interests has veered off pure EGT, but my questions still center around evolution — particularly the evolution of complex systems that are made up of many small components working in unison.  In particular, I’ve been studying Gavrilets et al. ‘s model of holey fitness landscapes, I think it’s a model with great potential for studying macroevolution, or evolution on very long timescales. I’m not the first one to this idea, of course — Arnold and many others have seen the possible connection also, although I think of it in a rather different light.

In this first post, I will give a short summary of this model, cobbled together from several papers and Gavrilets’ book, the Origin of Species. The basic premise is that organisms can be characterized by a large number of traits. When we say large, we mean very large — thousands or so. Gavrilets envisions this as being the number of genes in an organism, so tens of thousands. The important thing is that each of these traits can change independently of other ones.

The idea that organisms are points in very high dimensional space is not new, Fisher had it in his 1930 classic Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, where he used this insight to argue for micromutationism — in such high dimensional space, most mutations of appreciable size are detrimental, so Fisher argued that most mutations must be small (this result was later corrected by Kimura, Orr and others, who argued that most mutations must be of intermediate size, since tiny mutations are unlikely to fix in large populations).

However, even Fisher didn’t see another consequence of high-dimensional space, which Gavrilets exploited mercilessly. The consequence is that in high-enough dimensional space, there is no need to cross fitness valleys to move between one high fitness phenotype to another; all high fitness genotypes are connected. This is because connectivity is exceedingly easy in high dimensional space. Consider two dimensions, to get from one point to another, there are only two directions to move in. Every extra dimension offers a new option for such movement, that’s why there’s a minimum dimensionality to chaotic behavior — we can’t embed a strange attractor in a two dimensional phase plane, since trajectories can’t help but cross each other. Three dimensions is better, but n-dimensional space, where n is in the tens of thousands — that’s really powerful stuff.

Basically, every phenotype — every point in n-D space, is connected to a huge number of other points in n-D space. That is, every phenotype has a huge number of neighbors. Even if the probability of being a highly fit organism is exceedingly small, chances are high that one would exist among this huge number of neighbors. We know that if each highly fit phenotype is, on average, connected to another highly fit phenotype (via mutation), then the percolation threshold is reached where almost all highly fit phenotypes are connected in one giant connected component. In this way, evolution does not have to traverse fitness minima.

If we consider mutations to be point mutations of genes, then mutations can be considered to be a Manhattan distance type walk in n-D space. That’s just a fancy way of saying that we have n genes, and only one can be changed at a time. In that case, the number of neighbors any phenotype has is n, and if the probability of being highly fit is better than 1/n, then highly fit organisms are connected. This is even easier if we consider mutations to be random movements in n-D space. That is, if we consider an organism to be characterized by $\mathbf{p}=(p_1, p_2, ... p_n)$, where $p_i$ is the $i^{th}$ trait, and a mutation from $\mathbf{p}$ results in $\mathbf{p_m}=(p_1+\epsilon_1, ... p_n+\epsilon_n$), such that $\epsilon_i$ is a random small number that can be negative, and the Euclidean distance between $\mathbf{p_m}$ and $\mathbf{p}$ is less than $\delta$, where $\delta$ is the maximum mutation size, then the neighbors of $\mathbf{p}$ fill up the volume of a ball of radius $\delta$ around $\mathbf{p}$. The volume of this ball grows exponentially with n, so even a tiny probability of being highly fit will find some neighbor of $\mathbf{p}$ that is highly fit, because of the extremely large volume even for reasonably sized n.

The fact that evolution may never have to cross fitness minima is extremely important, it means that most of evolution may take place on “neutral bands”. Hartl and Taube had foreseen this really interesting result. Gavrilets mainly used this result to argue for speciation, which he envisions as a process that takes place naturally with reproductive isolation and has no need for natural selection.

Several improvements over the basic result have been achieved, mostly in the realm of showing that even if highly fit phenotypes are highly correlated (forming “highly fit islands” in phenotype space), the basic result of connectivity nevertheless holds (i.e. there will be bridges between those islands). Gavrilets’ book  summarizes some early results, but a more recent paper (Gravner et al.) is a real tour-de-force in this direction. Their last result shows that the existence of “incompatibility sets”, that is, sets of traits that destroy viability, nevertheless does not punch enough holes in n-D space to disconnect it. Overall, the paper shows that even with correlation, percolation (connectedness of almost all highly fit phenotypes) is still the norm.

Next Thursday, I will detail some of my own criticisms to this model and its interpretation. The week after next, I will hijack this model for my own purposes and I will attempt to show that such a model can display a great deal of historical contingency, leading to irreversible, Muller’s Ratchet type evolution that carries on in particular directions even against fitness considerations. This type of model, I believe, will provide an interesting bridge between micro and macroevolution.