Symbiogenesis as a Mechanism for Building Complex Adaptive Systems: A Review

In 1996 Daida et al. reviewed the case for using symbiosis as the basis for evolving complex adaptive systems [6]. Specific observations included the impact of different philosophical views taken by biologists as to what constituted a symbiotic relationship and whether symbiosis represented an operator or a state. The case was made for symbiosis as an operator. Thus, although specific cost benefit characterizations may vary, the underlying process of symbiosis is the same, supporting the operator based perspective. Symbiosis provides an additional mechanism for adaption/ complexification than available under Mendelian genetics with which Evolutionary Computation (EC) is most widely associated. In the following we review the case for symbiosis in EC. In particular, symbiosis appears to represent a much more effective mechanism for automatic hierarchical model building and therefore scaling EC methods to more difficult problem domains than through Mendelian genetics alone.