Redundancy creates opportunity in developmental representations

This paper investigates the influence of redundancy on the evolutionary performance of a gene regulatory network governing a cellular growth process. Redundancy is believed to play a key role in robustness and evolvability of biological systems. We use a cellular model controlled by a gene regulatory network to evolve elongated morphologies. We show that removing the redundancy in the genome during the evolution decreases the performance of the evolution strategy. A comparing run with few parameters and therefore no redundancy performs worst, which supports the hypothesis that redundancy improves evolvability.