Figure 10.

Top: The distribution of the fraction of individuals whose function is characterized by a certain number of cores for τ = 3 at generation 1000. For each box plot, the fraction of individuals within a population who have that number of the most common cores are plotted. At 1 on the x-axis, the number of individuals within a population who share the most common core are plotted, at 5 the fraction of individuals who have the 5 most common cores are plotted. Over half of all populations have 90% or more of their networks represented by only 4 cores. While having a small number of cores is not a unique strategy, it is far more common than having a unique structure for each individual. Bottom: A histogram showing the distribution of evolutionary distances between individuals within the same population (red) and individuals from other populations (blue). We can see here that networks within the same populations are generally highly related, generally requiring 5 or fewer evolutionary moves to convert between the two individuals. In contrast, individuals from different populations have more differences. This implies that while there is a purifying selection within a population for highly related structures, different populations have not converged toward the same structure. The distributions were compared using a Kolmogorov–Smirnov test and determined to be different with a p-value < 0.01.