Emergent criticality from coevolution in random Boolean networks

The coevolution of network topology and dynamics is studied in an evolutionary Boolean network model that is a simple model of a gene regulatory network. We find that a critical state emerges spontaneously resulting from the interplay between topology and dynamics during the evolution. The final evolved state is shown to be independent of initial conditions. The network appears to be driven to a random Boolean network with uniform in-degree of 2 in the large-network limit. However, for biologically realized network sizes, significant finite-size effects are observed including a broad in-degree distribution and an average in-degree connections between 2 and 3. These results may be important for explaining the properties of gene regulatory networks.