ReviewThe Journal of physiology2014
Bioattractors: dynamical systems theory and the evolution of regulatory processes.
Review in The Journal of physiology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers.
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Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Heuristically Adaptive Diffusion-Model Evolutionary Strategy.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Cell jamming transitions can affect regulatory protein gradients and prime evolutionary divergence.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Dynamical systems of fate and form in development.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025Review
- From genes to patterns: five key dynamical systems concepts to decode developmental regulatory mechanisms.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2025Review
- From genes to patterns: a framework for modeling the emergence of embryonic development from transcriptional regulation.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2025Article
- The logic of monsters: development and morphological diversity in stem-cell-based embryo models.Interface focus · 2024Review
- What Is a Plant Cell Type in the Age of Single-Cell Biology? It's Complicated.Annual review of cell and developmental biology · 2024Review
- Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- A bistable autoregulatory module in the developing embryo commits cells to binary expression fates.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- Article
- The origin of RNA interference: Adaptive or neutral evolution?PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Development and selective grain make plasticity 'take the lead' in adaptive evolution.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- The Radically Embodied Conscious Cybernetic Bayesian Brain: From Free Energy to Free Will and Back Again.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Homology of process: developmental dynamics in comparative biology.Interface focus · 2021Article
- Dynamical modules in metabolism, cell and developmental biology.Interface focus · 2021Article
- Tissue tectonics and the multi-scale regulation of developmental timing.Interface focus · 2021Review
- Quantifying cell transitions in C. elegans with data-fitted landscape models.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In this paper, we illustrate how dynamical systems theory can provide a unifying conceptual framework for evolution of biological regulatory systems. Our argument is that the genotype-phenotype map can be characterized by the phase portrait of the underlying regulatory process. The features of this portrait--such as attractors with associated basins and their bifurcations--define the regulatory and evolutionary potential of a system. We show how the geometric analysis of phase space connects Waddington's epigenetic landscape to recent computational approaches for the study of robustness and evolvability in network evolution. We discuss how the geometry of phase space determines the probability of possible phenotypic transitions. Finally, we demonstrate how the active, self-organizing role of the environment in phenotypic evolution can be understood in terms of dynamical systems concepts. This approach yields mechanistic explanations that go beyond insights based on the simulation of evolving regulatory networks alone. Its predictions can now be tested by studying specific, experimentally tractable regulatory systems using the tools of modern systems biology. A systematic exploration of such systems will enable us to understand better the nature and origin of the phenotypic variability, which provides the substrate for evolution by natural selection.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.