Related papers: Multimodal pattern formation in phenotype distribu…

Most theories of evolutionary diversification are based on equilibrium assumptions: they are either based on optimality arguments involving static fitness landscapes, or they assume that populations first evolve to an equilibrium state…

Evolution is simultaneously driven by a number of processes such as mutation, competition and random sampling. Understanding which of these processes is dominating the collective evolutionary dynamics in dependence on system properties is a…

Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…

Recent theoretical studies have shown that demographic stochasticity can greatly increase the tendency of asexually reproducing phenotypically diverse organisms to spontaneously evolve into localised clusters, suggesting a simple mechanism…

Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…

Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…

A mechanism of sympatric speciation is presented based on the interaction-induced developmental plasticity of phenotypes. First, phenotypes of individuals with identical genotypes split into a few groups, according to instability in the…

Mechanisms leading to speciation are a major focus in evolutionary biology. In this paper, we present and study a stochastic model of population where individuals, with type a or A, are equivalent from ecological, demographical and spatial…

A microscopic agent dynamical model for diploid age-structured populations is used to study evolution of polymorphism and sympatric speciation. The underlying ecology is represented by a unimodal distribution of resources of some width.…

We study macroevolutionary dynamics by extending microevolutionary competition models to long time scales. It has been shown that for a general class of competition models, gradual evolutionary change in continuous phenotypes (evolutionary…

Molecular phenotypes link genomic information with organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Quantitative traits are complex phenotypes that depend on multiple genomic loci. In this paper, we study the adaptive evolution of a…

We study a family of selection-mutation models of a sexual population structured by a phenotypical trait. The main feature of these models is the asymmetric trait heredity or fecundity between the parents : we assume that each individual…

Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…

Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…

Large sets of genotypes give rise to the same phenotype because phenotypic expression is highly redundant. Accordingly, a population can accept mutations without altering its phenotype, as long as thegenotype mutates into another one on the…

Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…

In large asexual populations, multiple beneficial mutations arise in the population, compete, interfere with each other, and accumulate on the same genome, before any of them fix. The resulting dynamics, although studied by many authors, is…

Evolutionary dynamics can be studied in well-mixed or structured populations. Population structure typically arises from the heterogeneous distribution of individuals in physical space or on social networks. Here we introduce a new type of…

Developmental bias plays a major role in phenotypic evolution. Some researchers have argued that phenotypes, regulated by development, can only evolve along restricted trajectory under certain scenarios, such as the case for mammalian molar…

Speciation is often associated with geographical barriers that limit gene flow. However, species can also emerge in continuous homogeneous environments through isolation by distance. When the environment is not homogeneous, natural…