Related papers: Evolution models with base substitutions, insertio…
The mutation and selection of regulatory DNA sequences is presented as an ideal model system of molecular evolution where genotype, phenotype, and fitness can be explicitly and independently characterized. In this theoretical study, we…
For two genotypes that have the same mean number of offspring but differ in the variance in offspring number, natural selection will favor the genotype with lower variance. The concept of fitness becomes cloudy under these conditions…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
We present a model for evolving agents using both genetic and cultural inheritance mechanisms. Within each agent our model maintains two distinct information stores we call the genome and the memome. Processes of adaptation are modeled as…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
We study a continuous-time dynamical system that models the evolving distribution of genotypes in an infinite population where genomes may have infinitely many or even a continuum of loci, mutations accumulate along lineages without…
Motivated by present activities in (statistical) physics directed towards biological evolution, we review the interplay of three evolutionary forces: mutation, selection, and genetic drift. The review addresses itself to physicists and…
We propose a mathematical framework for natural selection in finite populations. Traditionally, many of the selection-based processes used to describe cultural and genetic evolution (such as imitation and birth-death models) have been…
Evolutionary algorithms, inspired by natural evolution, aim to optimize difficult objective functions without computing derivatives. Here we detail the relationship between population genetics and evolutionary optimization and formulate a…
We present a quantitative model for the biological evolution of species body masses within large groups of related species, e.g., terrestrial mammals, in which body mass M evolves according to branching (speciation), multiplicative…
We discuss a population of sequences subject to mutations and frequency-dependent selection, where the fitness of a sequence depends on the composition of the entire population. This type of dynamics is crucial to understand the evolution…
Evolution, the engine behind the survival and growth of life on Earth, operates through the population-based process of reproduction. Inspired by this principle, this paper formally defines a newly emerging problem -- the population-based…
Functional effects of different mutations are known to combine to the total effect in highly nontrivial ways. For the trait under evolutionary selection (`fitness'), measured values over all possible combinations of a set of mutations yield…
We propose a model to characterize how a diffusing population adapts under a time periodic selection, while its environment undergoes shifts and size changes, leading to significant differences with classical results on fixed domains. After…
As artificial intelligence systems (AIs) become increasingly produced by recursive self-improvement, a form of evolution may emerge, with the traits of AI systems shaped by the success of earlier AIs in designing and propagating their…
During the course of evolution, an organism's genome can undergo changes that affect the large-scale structure of the genome. These changes include gene gain, loss, duplication, chromosome fusion, fission, and rearrangement. When gene gain…
We construct a pathwise formulation of a growing population of cells, based on two different samplings of lineages within the population, namely the forward and backward samplings. We show that a general symmetry relation, called…
Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming (GGGP) employs a variety of insights from evolutionary theory to autonomously design solutions for a given task. Recent insights from evolutionary biology can lead to further improvements in GGGP…
We investigate an simple evolutionary game of sequences and demonstrate on this example the structure of fitness landscapes in discrete problems. We show the smoothing action of the genotype-phenotype mapping which still makes it feasible…
We study the evolution of recombination using a microscopic model developed within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits. Two components of fitness are considered: a static one that describes adaptation to environmental factors not…