The living world is spectacularly complex, but the theory of evolution makes it possible to understand, step by step, its intricacies. Modeling is a powerful tool to overcome the limits of our intuition and understand how complex phenomena emerge from simple ingredients. Obviously, when changing the list of ingredients, the outcome can change, making their knowledge essential.
My goal is to integrate information about the mechanisms that underlie phenotypes – the genotype-phenotype map – in order to build realistic evolutionary models. This approach avoids making (many) arbitrary choices, in particular on the distribution of mutational effects, and on the constraints that may govern evolution: there may be pleiotropy, robustness, trade-offs, and these descriptors of the distribution of mutational effects may themselves evolve.
Remarkably, these mechanisms that underlie the phenotypes form networks, the evolution of which (or in which) I study. Three currently occupy me: gene networks, endocrine networks and metabolic networks.
