The relationship between intelligence and evolution is bidirectional: while evolution can help evolve intelligences, the degree of intelligence itself can impact evolution (Baldwin, 1896). In the field of Evolutionary Computation, the inverse relationship (impact of intelligence on evolution) is approached from the perspective of organism level behaviour (Hinton, 1996). We extend these ideas to the developmental (cellular morphogenetic) level in the context of an expanded view of intelligence as not only the ability of a system to navigate the three-dimensional world, but also as the ability to navigate other arbitrary spaces (transcriptional, anatomical, physiological, etc.). Here, we specifically focus on the intelligence of a minimal model of a system navigating anatomical morphospace, and assess how the degree and manner of problem solving competency during morphogenesis effects evolutionary dynamics. To this end, we evolve populations of artificial embryos using a standard genetic algorithm in silico. Artificial embryos were cellular collectives given the capacity to undergo morphogenetic rearrangement (e.g., regulative development) prior to selection within an evolutionary cycle. Results from our model indicates that morphogenetic competency significantly alters evolutionary dynamics, with evolution preferring to improve anatomical intelligence rather than perfect the structural genes. These observations hint that evolution in the natural world may be leveraging the problem solving competencies of cells at multiple scales to boost evolvability and robustness to novel conditions. We discuss implications of our results for the Developmental Biology and Artificial Life communities.

翻译：智能与进化之间存在双向关系：进化有助于智能的演化，而智能水平本身也会反作用于进化（Baldwin, 1896）。在进化计算领域，这种逆向关系（智能对进化的影响）通常从生物体行为层面进行研究（Hinton, 1996）。我们将其拓展至发育（细胞形态发生）层面，并将智能的范畴从系统在三维世界中的导航能力，扩展至对任意空间（如转录谱空间、解剖空间、生理空间等）的导航能力。本文聚焦于解剖形态空间导航系统的最小模型，探究形态发生过程中问题解决能力的高低与方式如何影响进化动态。为此，我们采用标准遗传算法在计算机中模拟人工胚胎群体的进化。人工胚胎被定义为具有形态发生重组能力（如调节性发育）的细胞群体，在进化周期中接受选择前即可进行形态重构。模型结果表明，形态发生能力显著改变了进化动态：进化更倾向于优化解剖智能而非完善结构基因。这些观察暗示自然界的进化可能正在多尺度上利用细胞的问题解决能力，以增强可进化性和应对新环境的鲁棒性。我们讨论了该结果对发育生物学与人工生命领域的启示。