Broad edge of chaos in strongly heterogeneous Boolean networks

Abstract

The dynamic stability of the Boolean networks representing a model for the gene transcriptional regulation (Kauffman model) is studied by calculating analytically and numerically the Hamming distance between two evolving configurations. This turns out to behave in a universal way close to the phase boundary only for in-degree distributions with a finite second moment. In-degree distributions of the form $P_d(k)\sim k^{-γ}$ with $2<γ<3$, thus having a diverging second moment, lead to a slower increase of the Hamming distance when moving towards the unstable phase and to a broadening of the phase boundary for finite $N$ with decreasing $γ$. We conclude that the heterogeneous regulatory network connectivity facilitates the balancing between robustness and evolvability in living organisms.