Constructional Selection is a Novel Evolutionary Mechanism

Mechanisms that have classically been proposed for the evolution of evolvability all invoke allele substitution at pre-existing loci (including Kauffman's suggestions as to how K could evolve [14]). These include:

1.

smooth landscapes as a side-effect of alleles that produce advantageous phenotypic stability (e.g. stable proteins, stable developmental pathways);

2.

neutral alleles that modify the landscape and hitchhike with later advantageous mutations they facilitate.

The evolution of smooth landscapes through the filtering of loci as they come into being is distinct from allelic substitution and does not require the particular effects mentioned above. Although models of gene duplication and evolution have been analyzed in evolutionary population genetics [15], the systematic effect of producing a more evolvable genotype-phenotype map has been mentioned in few sources [6,16,17].

Experiments of evolving computational genotype-phenotype maps using constructional selection should be explored for what insights they may provide about the structure of natural genotype-phenotype maps. The results here show that it may be wrong to assume that evolved adaptive landscapes follow patterns of mathematically generic landscapes.