SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE
On Growth and Form, and Function: Reusable Regulatory Handles Control Phenotypic Variation
How phenotypic transformations are implemented by changes in underlying regulatory dynamics remains a central question in developmental biology. Inspired by D'Arcy Thompson's 1917 "On Growth and Form", we ask whether coherent large-scale transformations of morphology can be encoded as low-dimensional modulations of a self-organizing developmental system. We use neural cellular automata (NCAs) as bio-inspired models of distributed development, in which a shared local regulatory network grows target morphologies from a single cell. We apply low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to pretrained NCAs, represen
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Evidence & attribution
- arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · 2026-09-24T13:05:57.000Z
First collected: 2026-09-25T06:12:46.948Z. This is not the publication date.