Towards a Formal Understanding of Bateson's Rule: Chromatic Symmetry in Cyclic Boolean Networks and its Relationship to Organism Growth and Cell Differentiation

Authors

Yuri Cantor, City University of New York Graduate Center
Bilal Khan, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Kirk Dombrowski, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2014

Citation

Procedia Computer Science 36 ( 2014 ), pp. 476 – 483, doi: 10.1016/j.procs.2014.09.024.

Comments

© 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.

Abstract

There has been considerable prior research on the biological processes of morphogenesis and cellular differentiation, and the manner by which these processes give rise to symmetries in biological structures. Here we extend our previous work on thermal robustness and attractor density in cyclic formal Boolean dynamical systems, introducing a new form of spectral analysis on digital organisms at the cellular level. We interpret the phenomena of radial and bilateral symmetry in terms of spatial periodicities in the color sequences, as manifested by an organism while it orbits in its attractors. We provide new results on the influence of various organism properties on its emergent color symmetries—providing initial insights toward an eventual formal understanding of metamerism and Bateson's Rule.