ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Symmetry and simplicity spontaneously emerge from the algorithmic nature of evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed.
- Detection of protein symmetry and structural rearrangements using secondary structure elements.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2026Article
- The Borderlands of Foldability: Lessons from Simplified Proteins.Trends in chemistry · 2026Article
- Simplicity and Complexity in Combinatorial Optimization.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Mapping life's disparity and evolutionary constraints in a geometric complexity space.Science advances · 2026Article
- Exploring the protein universe with distant similarity detection methods.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2026Review
- Generative epigenetic landscapes map the topology and topography of cell fates.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Bounding phenotype transition probabilities via conditional complexity.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Subword symmetry in natural languages.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- New insights on femoral head trabecular bone directionality in elderly humans using a micro-CT-based analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Tandem Repeats Provide Evidence for Convergent Evolution to Similar Protein Structures.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Basic Cells Special Features and Their Influence on Global Transport Properties of Long Periodic Structures.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Article
- Brain asymmetry as minimization of free energy: a theoretical model.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Selection of a promiscuous minimalist cAMP phosphodiesterase from a library of de novo designed proteins.Nature chemistry · 2024Article
- Non-Poissonian Bursts in the Arrival of Phenotypic Variation Can Strongly Affect the Dynamics of Adaptation.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Article
- Exploring Simplicity Bias in 1D Dynamical Systems.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Bias in the arrival of variation can dominate over natural selection in Richard Dawkins's biomorphs.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Impaired face symmetry detection under alcohol, but no 'beer goggles' effect.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2024Article
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7 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
SignificanceWhy does evolution favor symmetric structures when they only represent a minute subset of all possible forms? Just as monkeys randomly typing into a computer language will preferentially produce outputs that can be generated by shorter algorithms, so the coding theorem from algorithmic information theory predicts that random mutations, when decoded by the process of development, preferentially produce phenotypes with shorter algorithmic descriptions. Since symmetric structures need less information to encode, they are much more likely to appear as potential variation. Combined with an arrival-of-the-frequent mechanism, this algorithmic bias predicts a much higher prevalence of low-complexity (high-symmetry) phenotypes than follows from natural selection alone and also explains patterns observed in protein complexes, RNA secondary structures, and a gene regulatory network.
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