Achieving environmental tolerance through the initiation and exploitation of external information

It is often believed that biological organisms have an inherent tolerance to environmental changes. This is a seductive concept if transferred to artificial organisms. An experimental approach is taken to investigate if tolerance to the environmental is an inherent property of developing organisms. The environment used is an external environment which the phenotype have to develop and survive in. As such, it is the phenotype that needs to adapt to its surrounding. The results show that tolerance is a property that can be sought by evolution rather than an inherent property of the organism, i.e. genomes that have explicitly been exposed to environmental changes. Further, to exploit this property a definition of what environmental changes mean in an artificial development setting is needed. The article classifies the roles of environment in artificial development models and suggests an external environment wherein the organism develops and function.