Related papers: Selection Against Demographic Stochasticity in Age…
Large whole-genome sequencing projects have provided access to much of the rare variation in human populations, which is highly informative about population structure and recent demography. Here, we show how the age of rare variants can be…
We study how environmental stochasticity influences the long-term population size in certain one- and two-species models. The difficulty is that even when one can prove that there is persistence, it is usually impossible to say anything…
We follow up on a companion work that considered growth rates of populations growing at different sites, with different randomly varying growth rates at each site, in the limit as migration between sites goes to 0. We extend this work here…
Biological organisms have to cope with stochastic variations in both the external environment and the internal population dynamics. Theoretical studies and laboratory experiments suggest that population diversification could be an effective…
Many imaging techniques for biological systems -- like fixation of cells coupled with fluorescence microscopy -- provide sharp spatial resolution in reporting locations of individuals at a single moment in time but also destroy the dynamics…
Recent methods have been developed to map single-cell lineage statistics to population growth. Because population growth selects for exponentially rare phenotypes, these methods inherently depend on sampling large deviations from finite…
Horizontal gene transfer consists in exchanging genetic materials between microorganisms during their lives. This is a major mechanism of bacterial evolution and is believed to be of main importance in antibiotics resistance. We consider a…
We consider a stochastic individual-based model of adaptive dynamics for an asexually reproducing population with mutation, with linear birth and death rates, as well as a density-dependent competition. To depict repeating changes of the…
The evolutionary dynamics of molecular populations are strongly dependent on the structure of genotype spaces. The map between genotype and phenotype determines how easily genotype spaces can be navigated and the accessibility of…
Population dynamics of a competitive two-species system under the influence of random events are analyzed and expressions for the steady-state population mean, fluctuations, and cross-correlation of the two species are presented. It is…
Large populations may contain numerous simultaneously segregating polymorphisms subject to natural selection. Since selection acts on individuals whose fitness depends on many loci, different loci affect each other's dynamics. This leads to…
By exploiting an analogy between population genetics and statistical mechanics, we study the evolution of a polygenic trait under stabilizing selection, mutation, and genetic drift. This requires us to track only four macroscopic variables,…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
We study the population profile in a simple discrete time model of population dynamics. Our model, which is closely related to certain ``bit-string'' models of evolution, incorporates competition for resources via a population dependent…
Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
A demographic Allee effect occurs when individual fitness, at low densities, increases with population density. Coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates, Allee effects can have subtle effects on population persistence…
Identifying drivers of complex traits from the noisy signals of genetic variation obtained from high throughput genome sequencing technologies is a central challenge faced by human geneticists today. We hypothesize that the variants…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…