Related papers: Physics of Evolution: Selection without Fitness
Uncertainty, characterised by randomness and stochasticity, is ubiquitous in applications of evolutionary game theory across various fields, including biology, economics and social sciences. The uncertainty may arise from various sources…
Much of our understanding of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms derives from analysis of low-dimensional models: with few interacting species, or few axes defining "fitness". It is not always clear to what extent the intuition derived…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
Selection in a time-periodic environment is modeled via the continuous-time two-player replicator dynamics, which for symmetric pay-offs reduces to the Fisher equation of mathematical genetics. For a sufficiently rapid and cyclic…
The processes and mechanisms underlying the origin and maintenance of biological diversity have long been of central importance in ecology and evolution. The competitive exclusion principle states that the number of coexisting species is…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
The common understanding of protein evolution has been that neutral or slightly deleterious mutations are fixed by random drift, and evolutionary rate is determined primarily by the proportion of neutral mutations. However, recent studies…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
Frequency-dependent selection reflects the interaction between different species as they battle for limited resources in their environment. In a stochastic evolutionary game the species relative fitnesses guides the evolutionary dynamics…
We consider a periodic extension of the classical Kingman non-linear model (Kingman, 1978) for the balance between selection and mutation in a large population. In the original model, the fitness distribution of the population is modeled by…
The process of `Evolutionary Diffusion', i.e. reproduction with local mutation but without selection in a biological population, resembles standard Diffusion in many ways. However, Evolutionary Diffusion allows the formation of local peaks…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality, implicitly based on assumptions of spatial averaging, hold that natural selection cannot favor shorter lifespan without direct compensating benefit to individual reproductive success.…
Cooperation is a persistent behavioral pattern of entities pooling and sharing resources. Its ubiquity in nature poses a conundrum. Whenever two entities cooperate, one must willingly relinquish something of value to the other. Why is this…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
Under constant selection, each trait has a fixed fitness, and small mutation rates allow populations to efficiently exploit the optimal trait. Therefore it is reasonable to expect mutation rates will evolve downwards. However, we find this…
A common assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing evolution of complexity appear more nuanced. Evolution is deeply connected to learning, where…
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…
Mathematical theory of selection is developed within the frameworks of general models of inhomogeneous populations with continuous time. Methods that allow us to study the distribution dynamics under natural selection and to construct…