Related papers: The pattern of genetic hitchhiking under recurrent…
In a (two-type) Wright-Fisher diffusion with directional selection and two-way mutation, let $x$ denote today's frequency of the beneficial type, and given $x$, let $h(x)$ be the probability that, among all individuals of today's…
In a highly simplified view, a disease can be seen as the phenotype emerging from the interplay of genetic predisposition and fluctuating environmental stimuli. We formalize this situation in a minimal model, where a network (representing…
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…
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…
Biochemical and regulatory interactions central to biological networks are expected to cause extensive genetic interactions or epistasis affecting the heritability of complex traits and the distribution of genotypes in populations. However,…
Consider a population of $N$ individuals, each of them carrying a type in $\mathbb N_0$. The population evolves according to a Moran dynamics with selection and mutation, where an individual of type $k$ has the same selective advantage over…
In many models of genotypic evolution, the vector of genotype populations satisfies a system of linear ordinary differential equations. This system of equations models a competition between differential replication rates (fitness) and…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
Neutral theories have played a crucial and revolutionary role in fields such as population genetics and biogeography. These theories are critical by definition, in the sense that the overall growth rate of each single allele/species/type…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
We consider a heteroclinic network in the framework of winnerless competition of species. It consists of two levels of heteroclinic cycles. On the lower level, the heteroclinic cycle connects three saddles, each representing the survival of…
A classical view of speciation is that reproductive isolation arises as a by-product of genetic divergence. Here, individual-based simulations are used to evaluate whether the mechanisms implied by this view may result in rapid speciation…
Sexual reproduction presents significant challenges to formal treatment of evolutionary processes. A starting point for systematic treatments of ecological and evolutionary phenomena has been provided by the gene centered view of evolution…
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…
When biological populations expand into new territory, the evolutionary outcomes can be strongly influenced by genetic drift, the random fluctuations in allele frequencies. Meanwhile, spatial variability in the environment can also…
Chromosomal rearrangements, which shuffle DNA throughout the genome, are an important source of divergence across taxa. Using a paired-end read approach with Illumina sequence data for archaic humans, I identify changes in genome structure…
We study a continuum model of dislocation transport in order to investigate the formation of heterogeneous dislocation patterns. We propose a physical mechanism which relates the formation of heterogeneous patterns to the dynamics of a…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
We solve an adaptive search model where a random walker or L\'evy flight stochastically resets to previously visited sites on a $d$-dimensional lattice containing one trapping site. Due to reinforcement, a phase transition occurs when the…
We discuss two different ways of chromosomes' and genomes' evolution. Purifying selection dominates in large panmictic populations, where Mendelian law of independent gene assortment is valid. If the populations are small, recombination…