ArticleEcology and evolution2019
Early usage and meaning of evolvability.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolvability: progress and key questions.Bioscience · 2025Review
- Bias in the arrival of variation can dominate over natural selection in Richard Dawkins's biomorphs.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- A mathematical investigation of polyaneuploid cancer cell memory and cross-resistance in state-structured cancer populations.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Stochastic models of Mendelian and reverse transcriptional inheritance in state-structured cancer populations.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Why call it developmental bias when it is just development?Biology direct · 2021Article
- On the feasibility of saltational evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Early usage and meaning of evolvability.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Evolvability has become an enormously popular concept in evolutionary biology and in machine learning software architecture. While it is claimed that the term was coined in 1988 by Richard Dawkins, it was used as early as 1931 as a characteristic of life by John A. Thomson. We quote and review the earliest uses and definitions of evolvability in biological frameworks up until 1989, which are remarkably few. The meaning changed from simply the "ability to evolve" as a characteristic of life to various versions of including necessary variation to predict whether or not something could evolve to the rate and quality of that evolution. Or, meaning changed from the ability to evolve to the "quality" of the ability to evolve. Since then, evolvability has taken on many definitions as it has exploded in usage.
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