The Connectionist Framework for Gene Regulation
The Connectionist Framework for Gene Regulation
This chapter discusses the adaptivity of a gene regulation network to be determined by the proportion of times that it reacts adaptively to its microenvironment. A gene regulation network is accurate to the extent that it expresses only the right genes for each microenvironment. The problem of the evolvability of gene regulation networks becomes the question of how gene regulation networks can evolve to allow such accuracy. It is proposed here that the similarity of these networks to connectionist networks is what explains their evolvability. Discussion of adaptive gene expression should boil down all the developmental and environmental complexity to the gene level, which must be done if we are to talk about the evolution of genes, but it necessarily overlooks important details of why the facts are the way they are.
Keywords: adaptivity, gene regulation network, microenvironment, evolvability, connectionist networks, adaptive gene expression
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
