How Niche Construction Can Guide Coevolution

13 years 9 months ago

Download www.alife.cs.is.nagoya-u.ac.jp

Niche construction is the process whereby organisms, through their metabolism, activities, and choices, modify their own and/or each other’s niches. Our purpose is to clarify the interactions between evolution and niche construction by focusing on non-linear interactions between genetic and environmental factors shared by interacting species. We constructed a new ﬁtness landscape model termed the NKES model by introducing the environmental factors and their interactions with the genetic factors into Kauﬀman’s NKCS model. The evolutionary experiments were conducted using hill-climbing and niche-constructing processes on this landscape. Results have shown that the average ﬁtness among species strongly depends on the ruggedness of the ﬁtness landscape (K) and the degree of the eﬀect of niche construction on genetic factors (E). Especially, we observed two diﬀerent roles of niche construction: moderate perturbations on hill-climbing processes on the rugged landscapes, and t...

Reiji Suzuki, Takaya Arita

Real-time Traffic