Related papers: The look-ahead effect of phenotypic mutations
Selective sweeps are typically associated with a local reduction of genetic diversity around the adaptive site. However, selective sweeps can also quickly carry neutral mutations to observable population frequencies if they arise early in a…
Our theoretical understanding of crossover is limited by our ability to analyze how population diversity evolves. In this study, we provide one of the first rigorous analyses of population diversity and optimization time in a setting where…
Direct reciprocity is a powerful mechanism for evolution of cooperation based on repeated interactions between the same individuals. But high levels of cooperation evolve only if the benefit-to-cost ratio exceeds a certain threshold that…
Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…
It is generally accepted that populations are useful for the global exploration of multi-modal optimisation problems. Indeed, several theoretical results are available showing such advantages over single-trajectory search heuristics. In…
Statistical physics can describe the behavior of microbial populations consisting of many heterogeneous individuals. A direct consequence is the existence of phase transitions, where the behavior of a population changes discontinuously upon…
We reconsider the deterministic haploid mutation-selection equation with two types. This is an ordinary differential equation that describes the type distribution (forward in time) in a population of infinite size. This paper establishes…
Directed evolution as a widely-used engineering strategy faces obstacles in finding desired mutants from the massive size of candidate modifications. While deep learning methods learn protein contexts to establish feasible searching space,…
Predicting protein properties is paramount for biological and medical advancements. Current protein engineering mutates on a typical protein, called the wild-type, to construct a family of homologous proteins and study their properties.…
Multilevel selection occurs when short-term individual-level reproductive interests conflict with longer-term group-level fitness effects. Detecting and quantifying this phenomenon is key to understanding evolution of traits ranging from…
Functional effects of different mutations are known to combine to the total effect in highly nontrivial ways. For the trait under evolutionary selection (`fitness'), measured values over all possible combinations of a set of mutations yield…
The prediction of phenotypic traits using high-density genomic data has many applications such as the selection of plants and animals of commercial interest; and it is expected to play an increasing role in medical diagnostics. Statistical…
One of the most challenging issues of evolutionary biology concerns speciation, the emergence of new species from an initial one. The huge amount of species found in nature demands a simple and robust mechanism. Yet, no consensus has been…
Motivated by present activities in (statistical) physics directed towards biological evolution, we review the interplay of three evolutionary forces: mutation, selection, and genetic drift. The review addresses itself to physicists and…
We consider a fitness-structured population model with competition and migration between nearest neighbors. Under a combination of large population and rare migration limits we are particularly interested in the asymptotic behavior of the…
In the field of evolutionary robotics, choosing the correct encoding is very complicated, especially when robots evolve both behaviours and morphologies at the same time. With the objective of improving our understanding of the mapping…
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…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
We consider resequencing studies of associated loci and the problem of prioritizing sequence variants for functional follow-up. Working within the multivariate linear regression framework helps us to account for correlation across variants,…
This paper focuses on the maximum speed at which biological evolution can occur. I derive inequalities that limit the rate of evolutionary processes driven by natural selection, mutations, or genetic drift. These \emph{rate limits} link the…