An Artificial Life Model for Carcinogenesis

“Epigenetic Tracking” is the name of a model of cellular development that, coupled with an evolutionary technique, becomes an evo-devo method to generate arbitrary 2d or 3d shapes. The method evolves instructions contained in the genome inside cells, which guide the development of an artificial zygote into a mature phenotype: as such it belongs to the field of “artificial embryology”, or “computational development”. In silico experiments have proved its effectiveness in developing shapes of any kind and complexity, establishing its potential to generate the complexity typical of biological systems. Furthermore, it has also been shown how the underlying model of development is able to produce the artificial version of key biological phenomena such as embryogenesis, “junk DNA”, and ageing. In this paper we show how malfunctions in the model lead to a phenomenon that can be considered the artificial equivalent of the process of carcinogenesis, which is explored through a simulation and analysed for two categories of tumours, teratomas and all other tumours, a distinction that emerges naturally from the framework.