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The drift-barrier hypothesis states that random genetic drift constrains the refinement of a phenotype under natural selection. The influence of effective population size and the genome-wide deleterious mutation rate were studied…
In this article, we consider a generalisation of the spatial Muller's ratchet introduced by Foutel-Rodier and Etheridge. This particle system is a spatial model of an asexual population, with birth and death rates that depend on the local…
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
We consider the dynamics of a non-recombining haploid population of finite size which accumulates deleterious mutations irreversibly. This ratchet like process occurs at a finite speed in the absence of epistasis, but it has been suggested…
The n-person Prisoner's Dilemma is a widely used model for populations where individuals interact in groups. The evolutionary stability of populations has been analysed in the literature for the case where mutations in the population may be…
Under constant selection, each trait has a fixed fitness, and small mutation rates allow populations to efficiently exploit the optimal trait. Therefore it is reasonable to expect mutation rates will evolve downwards. However, we find this…
We consider an asexual biological population of constant size $N$ evolving in discrete time under the influence of selection and mutation. Beneficial mutations appear at rate $U$ and their selective effects $s$ are drawn from a distribution…
Although mutations drive the evolutionary process, the rates at which the mutations occur are themselves subject to evolutionary forces. Our purpose here is to understand the role of selection and random genetic drift in the evolution of…
We study the stationary state of a population evolving under the action of random genetic drift, selection and recombination in which both deleterious and reverse beneficial mutations can occur. We find that the equilibrium fraction of…
Sexually reproducing populations with small number of individuals may go extinct by stochastic fluctuations in sex determination, causing all their members to become male or female in a generation. In this work we calculate the time to…
We model and study the genetic evolution and conservation of a population of diploid hermaphroditic organisms, evolving continuously in time and subject to resource competition. In the absence of mutations, the population follows a 3-type…
We consider the accumulation of beneficial and deleterious mutations in large asexual populations. The rate of adaptation is affected by the total mutation rate, proportion of beneficial mutations and population size $N$. We show that…
We derived a new speed limit in population dynamics, which is a fundamental limit on the evolutionary rate. By splitting the contributions of selection and mutation to the evolutionary rate, we obtained the new bound on the speed of…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
Community assembly is studied using individual-based multispecies models. The models have stochastic population dynamics with mutation, migration, and extinction of species. Mutants appear as a result of mutation of the resident species,…
Most new mutations are deleterious and are eventually eliminated by natural selection. But in an adapting population, the rapid amplification of beneficial mutations can hinder the removal of deleterious variants in nearby regions of the…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
If deleterious mutations near a fitness maximum in a spatially distributed population are sufficiently frequent or detrimental, the population can undergo a fitness collapse, similarly to the Muller's ratchet effect in well-mixed…
The OneMax problem, alternatively known as the Hamming distance problem, is often referred to as the "drosophila of evolutionary computation (EC)", because of its high relevance in theoretical and empirical analyses of EC approaches. It is…
We consider a model of asexually reproducing individuals with random mutations and selection. The rate of mutations is proportional to the population size, $N$. The mutations may be either beneficial or deleterious. In a paper by Yu,…