Toussaint Marc, von Seelen Werner
Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH, Carl-Legien-Strasse 30, 63073 Offenbach/Main, Germany.
Biosystems. 2007 Nov-Dec;90(3):769-82. doi: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2007.03.004. Epub 2007 Apr 13.
The structural organization of biological systems is one of nature's most fascinating aspects, but its origin and functional role is not yet fully understood. For instance, basic adaptational mechanisms like genetic mutation and Hebbian adaptation seem to be generic and invariant across many species and are, on their own, fairly well investigated and understood. However, it is the organism's structure - the representations these mechanisms act upon - that bears the complex functional effects of these mechanisms. While typical technical approaches to system design require detailed problem models and suffer from the need to explicitly take care of all possible cases, the organization of biological systems seems to induce inherent adaptability, flexibility and robustness. In this discussion paper we address the concept of structured variability, particularly the role of system structure as implementing a certain representation on which basic variational mechanisms act on. The functional adaptability (or search distribution) depends crucially on this representation.
生物系统的结构组织是自然界最引人入胜的方面之一，但其起源和功能作用尚未得到充分理解。例如，基因突变和赫布可塑性等基本适应机制似乎在许多物种中都是通用且不变的，并且就其本身而言，已经得到了相当充分的研究和理解。然而，正是生物体的结构——这些机制作用的表现形式——承载了这些机制的复杂功能效应。虽然系统设计的典型技术方法需要详细的问题模型，并且需要明确处理所有可能的情况，但生物系统的组织似乎具有内在的适应性、灵活性和鲁棒性。在这篇讨论论文中，我们探讨结构化变异性的概念，特别是系统结构作为实现某种表现形式的作用，基本变分机制作用于这种表现形式。功能适应性（或搜索分布）关键取决于这种表现形式。
