  Evolvability is defined as the ability of a population to generate heritable
variation to facilitate its adaptation to new environments or selection
pressures. In this article, we consider evolvability as a phenotypic trait
subject to evolution and discuss its implications in the adaptation of cell
populations. We explore the evolutionary dynamics of an actively proliferating
population of cells subject to changes in their proliferative potential and
their evolvability using a stochastic individual-based model and its
deterministic continuum counterpart through numerical simulations of these
models. We find robust adaptive trajectories that rely on cells with high
evolvability rapidly exploring the phenotypic landscape and reaching the
proliferative potential with the highest fitness. The strength of selection on
the proliferative potential, and the cost associated with evolvability, can
alter these trajectories such that, if both are sufficiently constraining,
highly evolvable populations can become extinct in our individual-based model
simulations. We explore the impact of this interaction at various scales,
discussing its effects in undisturbed environments and also in disrupted
contexts, such as cancer.
