Examples of evolving networks in chemistry
Synthetic Pathways

... is the only example I can think of right now.

As far back as 1971¹ people have been positing the possibility of an AI to search for novel synthesis paths, but only a couple of years ago a decent one was developed² which could interpret literature and create novel sets of steps for particular reactions -- for example, given a particular reactant and product, produce a set of steps which would produce one from the other. The particular focus of the paper for the 2012 one was to produce single-pot (multi-step) procedures to replace awkward separated multi-step syntheses, but in principle the procedure is generalisable to any path.


Sridharan, N.S., An Application of Artificial Intelligence to Organic Chemical Synthesis, Doctoral Thesis, State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York, July 1971.
C M Gothard et al, Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., 2012, 51, 7922 (DOI: 10.1002/anie.201202155) but there's a good write-up by Philip Ball in Chemistry World, August 2012 issue.