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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Canalization is a form of network robustness known to exist in certain biological networks, in particular genetic regulatory networks. N-K Boolean networks are simple models of genetic regulatory networks. In this talk, I will review some properties of Boolean networks and discuss what it means to say that a Boolean network is canalized. I will also discuss some recent results concerning the self-organized evolution of canalization in Boolean Networks, including the effects of stochastic noise on the evolutionary process and the existence of finite size effects in the process that may indicate that the evolution of organisms with small genomes is fundamentally different than it is for more complex organisms.