Related papers: Clonal Interference, Multiple Mutations, and Adapt…
The famous "two-fold cost of sex" is really the cost of anisogamy -- why should females mate with males who do not contribute resources to offspring, rather than isogamous partners who contribute equally? In typical anisogamous populations,…
We study the limit of many small mutations of a model of population dynamics. The population is structured by phonological traits and is spatially inhomogeneous. The various sub-populations compete for the same nutrient which diffuses…
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…
In a geographically distributed population, assortative clustering plays an important role in evolution by modifying local environments. To examine its effects in a linear habitat, we consider a one-dimensional grid of cells, where each…
Social identities are among the key factors driving behavior in complex societies. Signals of social identity are known to influence individual behaviors in the adoption of innovations. Yet the population-level consequences of identity…
Genetic diversity is central to the process of evolution. Both natural selection and random genetic drift are influenced by the level of genetic diversity of a population; selection acts on diversity while drift samples from it. At a given…
The adaptation of biological species to their environment depends on their traits. When various biological processes occur (survival, reproduction, migration, etc.), the trait distribution may change with respect to time and space. In the…
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…
We updated the agent based Monte Carlo code HERITAGE that simulates human evolution within restrictive environments such as interstellar, sub-light speed spacecraft in order to include the effects of population genetics. We incorporated a…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…
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…
The question as to why most higher organisms reproduce sexually has remained open despite extensive research, and has been called "the queen of problems in evolutionary biology". Theories dating back to Weismann have suggested that the key…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…
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…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
We have carried out a set of Monte Carlo simulations to study a number of fundamental aspects of the dynamical evolution of multiple stellar populations in globular clusters with different initial masses, fractions of second generation (2G)…
We consider a biological population in which a beneficial mutation is undergoing a selective sweep when a second beneficial mutation arises at a linked locus and we investigate the probability that both mutations will eventually fix in the…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
In multicellular organisms, several cell states coexist. For determining each cell type, cell-cell interactions are often essential, in addition to intracellular gene expression dynamics. Based on dynamical systems theory, we propose a…
Temporal environmental variations are ubiquitous in nature, yet most of the theoretical works in population genetics and evolution assume fixed environment. Here we analyze the effect of variations in carrying capacity on the fate of a…