Evolvability is the ability of a biological system to produce phenotypic variation that is both
heritable and adaptive. It has long been the subject of anecdotal observations and …

Why isn't random variation always deleterious? Are there factors that sometimes make
adaptation easier? Biological systems are extraordinarily robust to perturbation by …

Evolvability, the ability of populations to adapt, can evolve through changes in the
mechanisms determining genetic variation and in the processes of development. Here we …

Evolvability, the ability of populations to adapt, has recently emerged as a major unifying
concept in biology. Although the study of evolvability offers new insights into many important …

Evolvability is an organism's capacity to generate heritable phenotypic variation. Metazoan
evolution is marked by great morphological and physiological diversification, although the …

In recent years, biologists have increasingly been asking whether the ability to evolve—the
evolvability—of biological systems, itself evolves, and whether this phenomenon is the result …

Understanding the relationship between robustness and evolvability is key to understand
how living things can withstand mutations, while producing ample variation that leads to …

Robustness seems to be the opposite of evolvability. If phenotypes are robust against
mutation, we might expect that a population will have difficulty adapting to an environmental …

We examine a simple form of the evolution of evolvability—the evolution of mutation rates—
in a simple model system. The system is composed of many agents moving, reproducing …

Adaptive evolution is shaped by the interaction of population genetics, natural selection and
underlying network and biochemical constraints. Variation created by mutation, the raw …