Fig 7. Robustness of the developmental dynamics against perturbations.

The interaction matrices were constructed from the given number of embryo-adult vector pairs according to Eq (4). The performance was expressed by the Pearson correlation(s) between the desired and the experienced adult state(s) for all developmental pathways after T = 150 iterations averaged over 300 matrices and 100 perturbations for each parameter combination. (A) Performance against the proportion of the flipped embryonic vector elements. (B). Performance against the standard deviation (SD) of the perturbation of the interaction matrix. All elements of the matrix were perturbed additively by an N(0,SD) random number. (C) Performance against the proportion of nullified elements of the interaction matrix. Each element of the interaction matrix was set to zero with the given probability. Relevant parameters are as in Fig 5.