Evolvability

Across nature and society, complex systems face a fundamental tension: how to remain robust while also being capable of adaptation. This challenge lies at the core of both evolution in living systems and human innovation. The Theme takes this tension as its starting point, exploring evolvability: the capacity of a system to generate variation that can sometimes lead to improvement. 

Originally developed in evolutionary biology to describe how populations respond to selection, evolvability has increasingly surfaced across a wide range of disciplines. From medicine and engineering to computer science and the social sciences, researchers are grappling with similar questions about how systems change, adapt, and improve. Yet despite these shared concerns, these fields rarely interact, and no common framework currently exists to connect their insights. 

This Theme explores whether evolvability can offer such a framework. By bringing different perspectives into dialogue, it examines how key concepts – such as variation, selection, and robustness – play out across domains, from cancer evolution and biological systems to technological innovation and artificial intelligence. 

The Theme centres on three key questions:

• Can evolvability be meaningfully applied across disciplinary boundaries, and do common principles underlie change in biological, technological, and social systems?
• How do different fields define and measure evolvability and robustness, and what can be learned by comparing these approaches?
• And crucially, can evolvability serve as a general framework for understanding functional and progressive change – and for responding to contemporary challenges such as rapid AI-driven transformation? 

Taken together, these questions ask whether evolvability can function as a shared conceptual space – a way of connecting insights across disciplines to better understand how systems adapt under competing demands for stability and change.