BookTalk.org

This study is shedding some new light on the matter.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 115612.htm

"An important implication of this result is that traditional selective and adaptive explanations for phenomena such as increasing evolvability deserve more scrutiny and may turn out unnecessary in some cases,"

Here is something that captured my interest as well:

"The algorithms used for the simulations are abstractly based on how organisms are evolved, but not on any particular real-life organism," explained Lehman.

Not only are we held to abstraction when creating models, we also are up against the super difficult challenge of mimicking life, highly complex in itself, and perhaps even more so in relation to its environment, ALSO a complex system.

I haven't read much on evolvability. Without googling the term, I'd assume it's the rate at which a species is able to evolve? I'd guess the underlying capacity is mutation rates and how well biological mechanisms suppress negative mutations. I read an article once that was about redundancy with regards to mutations. For example, our use of proteins. We could have a negative mutation regarding how we create certain proteins, but there are actually a number of mutations that must happen in parallel in order for us to be negatively affected. Mutation redundancy.