Computational Embryology: Past, Present and Future

This chapter describes research into the embryonic field of Computational Embryology. The chapter starts with a brief history of embryology and the contributions scientists have made over the years causing the gradual amalgamation of embryology and genetics to form developmental biology. This is followed by a detailed investigation into the evolution of computational embryogenies. The focus of this chapter is on the two most promising types of embryogeny: Explicit and Implicit, investigating the evolvability and scalability of both embryogenies for morphogenesis. The problem set is that of evolving certain predefined shapes letters of the alphabet. The results show that both embryogenies are good at defining different morphologies, but significantly, the implicit embryogeny incurs no increase in genotype size as the problem is scaled. Finally, the chapter ends with a description of a more biologically plausible computational model of aspects of biological development.