Interacting molecules create regulatory architectures that can persist despite turnover of molecules. Although epigenetic changes occur within the context of such architectures, there is limited understanding of how they can influence the heritability of changes. Here, I develop criteria for the heritability of regulatory architectures and use quantitative simulations of interacting regulators parsed as entities, their sensors, and the sensed properties to analyze how architectures influence heritable epigenetic changes. Information contained in regulatory architectures grows rapidly with the number of interacting molecules and its transmission requires positive feedback loops. While these architectures can recover after many epigenetic perturbations, some resulting changes can become permanently heritable. Architectures that are otherwise unstable can become heritable through periodic interactions with external regulators, which suggests that mortal somatic lineages with cells that reproducibly interact with the immortal germ lineage could make a wider variety of architectures heritable. Differential inhibition of the positive feedback loops that transmit regulatory architectures across generations can explain the gene-specific differences in heritable RNA silencing observed in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. More broadly, these results provide a foundation for analyzing the inheritance of epigenetic changes within the context of the regulatory architectures implemented using diverse molecules in different living systems.

Collaborative hunting, in which predators play different and complementary roles to capture prey, has been traditionally believed to be an advanced hunting strategy requiring large brains that involve high-level cognition. However, recent findings that collaborative hunting has also been documented in smaller-brained vertebrates have placed this previous belief under strain. Here, using computational multi-agent simulations based on deep reinforcement learning, we demonstrate that decisions underlying collaborative hunts do not necessarily rely on sophisticated cognitive processes. We found that apparently elaborate coordination can be achieved through a relatively simple decision process of mapping between states and actions related to distance-dependent internal representations formed by prior experience. Furthermore, we confirmed that this decision rule of predators is robust against unknown prey controlled by humans. Our computational ecological results emphasize that collaborative hunting can emerge in various intra- and inter-specific interactions in nature, and provide insights into the evolution of sociality.