...makes things happen quicker and cheaper.
I found a preprint of the article (from July 12, 2012) here. Haven't had a chance to read it through yet, but the authors' Discussion and Conclusions provides a little more clarity than the popular article:
Overall, this paper supports the hypothesis that selection to reduce connection costs causes modularity, even in unchanging environments. The results also open new areas of research into identifying connection costs in networks without physical connections (e.g. genetic regulatory networks) and investigating whether pressures to minimize connection costs may explain modularity in human-created networks (e.g. communication and social networks).
It is tempting to consider any component of modularity that arises due to minimizing connection costs as a ‘spandrel’, in that it emerges as a byproduct of selection for another trait17. However, because the resultant modularity produces evolvability, minimizing connection costs may serve as a bootstrapping process that creates initial modularity that can then be further elevated by selection for evolvability. Such hypotheses for how modularity initially arises are needed, because selection for evolvability cannot act until enough modularity exists to increase the speed of adaptation.
Knowing that selection to reduce connection costs produces modular networks will substantially advance fields that harness
evolution for engineering, because a longstanding challenge therein has been evolving modular designs. It will additionally
aid attempts to evolve accurate models of biological networks, which catalyze medical and biological research. The functional modularity generated also makes synthetically evolved networks easier to understand. These results will thus generate immediate benefits in many fields of applied engineering, in addition to furthering our quest to explain one of nature’s predominant organizing principles.
Lots of pretty graphics showing the results of their simulations, too.
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