Bedau, Mark A., John S. McCaskill, Norman H. Packard, and Steen Rasmussen. “Towards a comprehensive Alife-model of the evolution of the nervous system and adaptive behavior.” (2000): 410-419.
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The potentials and tools that are offered by Alife for biology in modeling the nervous system and animal behavior are mainly unexploited. There is no consistent Alife model of the biological evolution of the nervous system as yet. whereas the modeling tools are at hand and their application for this purpose seems evident. In a biologically grounded model we have to make every possible effort to use principles known from biology, and to minimize the arbitrarily employed organizing rules. The aim of our work is to create a biologically accurate Alife model of the formation and evolution of the nervous system in connection with the adaptive behavior. In this article we concentrate on the structure of the modeled genome, which is the basis of playing a double biological role: to ensure an open-ended evolutionary process, as well as to direct the ontogenesis. The main questions we examined are: what are the basic rules of construction that are sufficient to create a workable nervous system and how can we model them in a biologically realistic way?