Research
Robustness and Evolvability of Living Systems
Living things are unimaginably complex, yet they have withstood a withering assault of harmful influences over several billion years. These influences include cataclysmic changes in the environment, as well as a constant barrage of internal changes, mutations. And not only has life survived, it has thrived and radiated into millions of diverse species. Such resilience may be surprising, because complexity suggests fragility. If you have ever built a house of cards, you will know what I mean: The house eventually comes tumbling down. Why is an organism not a molecular house of cards? Why do not slight disturbances (especially mutations) cause key organismal functions to fail catastrophically? And is the robustness of organisms to change itself a consequence of past evolution? How does it affect evolvability, the potential for future innovation in evolution? These are some of the questions we ask in our research.
Selected Publications
Wagner, A. (2005) Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ [PUP]
Hafner, M., Koeppl, H., Hasler, M., Wagner, A. (2009) “Glocal” robustness analysis and model discrimination for circadian oscillators. PloS Computational Biology 5(10): e1000534. [reprint request] 
Wagner, A. (2008) Robustness and evolvability: A paradox resolved. Proc. Roy. Soc. London Series. B 275, 91-100. [reprint request]
Ciliberti, S, Martin, OC, Wagner, A. (2007) Robustness can evolve gradually in complex regulatory networks with varying topology. PLoS Computational Biology 3(2): e15. [reprint request]
Wagner, A . (2005) Robustness, Neutrality,
and Evolvability. FEBS
Letters579: 1772–1778. [reprint request]
Wagner, A. (2005) Distributed robustness versus
redundancy as causes of mutational robustness. Bioessays 27 ,176–188. [reprint request]
Wagner, A. (2000) Mutational robustness
in genetic networks of yeast. Nature Genetics 24,
355 - 361. [reprint request]