Evolutionary teleomorphology

The physical layout of organs and neural structures in biological systems is important to their functioning, and is the result of evolutionary selection forces. We believe this is true even at the individual neuron level, and should be accounted for in any bio-based approach. In particular, when transmission delay is taken into account, the physical layout problem (PLP) of neural centers and individual neurons has a great impact on any computation they perform. We demonstrate on a simple example that: (1) performance can depend crucially on the physical layout of the computational nodes in a system, and (2) evolutionary schemes can be used to find near-optimal solutions to PLP.