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How adaptive evolution to one environmental stress improves or suppresses adaptation to another is an important problem in evolutionary biology. For instance, in microbiology, the evolution of bacteria to be resistant to different…
Darwin's theory of evolution emphasized that positive selection of functional proficiency provides the fitness that ultimately determines the structure of life, a view that has dominated biochemical thinking of enzymes as perfectly…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
The fitness landscape encodes the mapping of genotypes to fitness and provides a succinct representation of possible trajectories followed by an evolving population. Evolutionary accessibility is quantified by the existence of…
Possibility to establish macroscopic phenomenological theory for biological systems, akin to the akin to the well-established framework of thermodynamics, is briefly reviewed. We introduce the concept of an evolutionary fluctuation-response…
Evolvability refers to the ability of an individual genotype (solution) to produce offspring with mutually diverse phenotypes. Recent research has demonstrated that divergent search methods, particularly novelty search, promote evolvability…
The relevance of chaos to evolution is discussed in the context of the origin and maintenance of diversity and complexity. Evolution to the edge of chaos is demonstrated in an imitation game. As an origin of diversity, dynamic clustering of…
Non-uniform rates of morphological evolution and evolutionary increases in organismal complexity, captured in metaphors like "adaptive zones", "punctuated equilibrium" and "blunderbuss patterns", require more elaborate explanations than a…
Developmental trajectories are known to be canalized, or robust to both environmental and genetic perturbations. However, even when these trajectories are decanalized by an environmental perturbation outside of the range of conditions to…
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…
Cells generally change their internal state to adapt to an environmental change, and accordingly evolve in response to the new conditions. This process involves phenotypic changes that occur over several different time scales, ranging from…
An equation describing the evolution of phenotypic distribution is derived using methods developed in statistical physics. The equation is solved by using the singular perturbation method, and assuming that the number of bases in the…
In general, cellular phenotypes, as measured by concentrations of cellular components, involve large degrees of freedom. However, recent measurement has demonstrated that phenotypic changes resulting from adaptation and evolution in…
Tumour progression has been described as a sequence of traits or phenotypes that cells have to acquire if the neoplasm is to become an invasive and malignant cancer. Although the genetic mutations that lead to these phenotypes are random,…
A fundamental issue discussed in evolutionary biology is the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms. Here we develop non-robust models provided in [1] and attempt to get robust models investigated how differentiation of…
Phenotypic evolution implies sequential fixations of new genomic sequences. The speed at which these mutations fixate depends, in part, on the relative fitness (selection coefficient) of the mutant vs. the ancestor. Using a simple…
Stochastic phenotype switching has been suggested to play a beneficial role in microbial populations by leading to the division of labour among cells, or ensuring that at least some of the population survives an unexpected change in…
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…
The continuity of life and its evolution, we proposed, emerge from an interactive group process manifested in networks of interaction. We term this process \textit{survival-of-the-fitted}. Here, we reason that survival of the fitted results…
Speciation is of fundamental importance to understanding the huge diversity of life on Earth. In contrast to current phenomenological models, we develop a biophysically motivated approach to study speciation involving the co-evolution of…