Genetic evolution through stochastic mutation dynamics

Evolution of mutation rates is studied by introducing a simple model of self-replicating system, in which there is no explicit mechanism to control the mutation rates. The suitable network of species is spontaneously constructed for a given environment and is sustained through the oscillation among species. We find that our model shows a close relationships between the functional importance of gene and the distribution of its mutation rate. We apply our algorithm to a problem for optimization and compare with performance of fixed mutation algorithms and simulated annealing