An investigation of redundant genotype-phenotype mappings and their role in evolutionary search

The neutral theory of evolution suggests that most mutations do not cause a phenotypic change. In this case the mapping from genotype to phenotype contains redundancy such that many mutations do not have an appreciable effect on the phenotype. This can result in neutral networks; sets of genotypes connected by single point mutations that map to the same phenotype. A population is able to drift along these networks, eventually encountering phenotypes of higher fitness, thus reducing the chance of becoming trapped in sub-optimal regions of genotype space. In this paper we explore the use and benefit of redundant mappings for evolutionary search. We investigate the properties of several genotype-phenotype mappings by performing random walks along the neutral networks in their genotype spaces. The properties are explored further by performing adaptive walks in which a concept of fitness is introduced. A mapping based on a random Boolean network was found to have particularly interesting properties in both cases