Balancing robustness and evolvability

To achieve this consistency, organisms must have a balance between robustness and evolvability, that is, between resisting and allowing change in their own internal states [1-3]. [...]they must achieve this balance on multiple time scales, including physiological responses to changes over an individual life and evolutionary responses, in which a population of genomes continually updates its encoded information about past environments and how future generations should respond given that record. According to one alternate hypothesis, mutational robustness is not so much a directly evolved property as it is a correlated benefit of selection for robustness in the face of variable environments [10].