Evolution of division of labor in genetically homogenous groups

Abstract

Within nature, the success of many organisms, including certain species of insects, mammals, slime molds, and bacteria, is attributed to their performance of division of labor, where individuals specialize on specific roles and cooperate to survive. The evolution of division of labor is challenging to study because of the slow pace of biological evolution and imperfect historical data. In this paper, we use digital evolution to evolve groups of clonal organisms that exhibit division of labor. We then investigate what mechanisms they use to perform division of labor (i.e., location awareness or communication) and discover that it varies according to the type of roles being performed. Lastly, we created an environment where groups of organisms needed to complete a set of tasks, but could do so as either generalists or specialists. We varied the costs of switching tasks and determined that increased costs can result in the evolution of division of labor. Moreover, a group used as a case study exhibited both division of labor and cooperative problem decomposition, where members of the group shared partial solutions to solve the full set of problems. This approach has the potential to inform predictions in biological studies, as well as achieving division of labor when using evolutionary computation to solve more complex engineering problems.

Using Reproductive Altruism to Evolve Multicellularity in Digital Organisms

“…Other researchers have studied task-related division of labor, wherein individuals cells cooperate to perform specialized tasks efficiently, as a mechanism by which multicellularity can arise (Michod, 2007). Goldsby et al (2010) investigated task-related division of labor within the Avida platform and found that digital organisms are capable of selecting specialized roles in groups using both spatial information and inter-organism communication.…”

Behavioral Specialization in Embodied Evolutionary Robotics: Why So Difficult?

“…Classic (as in off-line) evolutionary robotics has already been used as a tool to explore important issues such as the nature of self-organized regulation mechanisms (Waibel et al, 2006;Duarte et al, 2011Duarte et al, , 2012aLichocki et al, 2012;Ferrante et al, 2015), the benefits of communication (Trianni et al, 2007;Goldsby et al, 2010), the importance of coordination (Bernard et al, 2016b), and the trade-off between evolving polymorphic and monomorphic populations (Waibel et al, 2009;Bernard et al, 2015Bernard et al, , 2016aTuci and Rabérin, 2015). However, embodied evolutionary robotics poses a problem on its own as mating and reproduction are performed in situ, meaning that how and where interactions between individuals are performed actually influence the course of evolution.…”

Evolving Specialisation in a Population of Heterogeneous Robots: the Challenge of Bootstrapping and Maintaining Genotypic Polymorphism

“…However, most research focus on the particular case of homogeneous groups of individuals (Waibel et al, 2009) as is classic in evolutionary robotics. This means that the individuals are forced to rely on phenotypical plasticity (Waibel et al, 2006;Ferrante et al, 2015;Eskridge et al, 2015) and/or environmental cues (Waibel et al, 2006;Goldsby et al, 2010) in order to achieve specialisation.…”