Abstract: The metamorphic elements and the metamorphic evolutionary techniques are proposed for the first time. Beginning with the analysis of working characteristics and the topology change of metamorphic mechanisms, integrating the structural composition principle with topological configuration decomposition, the genetic configuration modeling for metamorphic mechanisms is proposed. This is followed by the configuration transformation and evolutionary operations. Modeling mechanism elements as metamorphic genes and cells, the corresponding operations can be obtained by the evolutionary rules by substantive examples. Thus, five evolutionary schemes are explored as aggregation operation, genovariation aggregation operation, intersection operation, direct sum operation and segregation operation. The evolution operators are based on set theory and the essence is to simulate the evolution procedure in an automated and computational means by using the rules from set theory based on the analysis of the evolution capability and performance of the metamorphic elements corresponding to the specific evolution characteristics and inherent genetic evolution rules. This results in the genetic evolution schemes developed to serve as a vehicle for topology change and mobility alteration. The configuration synthesis methodology based on the biological concept is further proposed with a procedure for evolutionary synthesis.

Key words: Bionic design, Configuration synthesis, Creative design, Evolutionary rules, Genetic design, Metamorphic cell, Metamorphic gene, Metamorphic mechanisms, Variable topology