Related papers: Fluctuation Domains in Adaptive Evolution
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
Biodiversity and extinction are central issues in evolution. Dynamical balance among different species in ecosystems is often described by deterministic replicator equations with moderate success. However, fluctuations are inevitable,…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
Phenotypic fluctuations and plasticity can generally affect the course of evolution, a process known as the Baldwin effect. Several studies have recast this effect and claimed that phenotypic plasticity acceler- ates evolutionary rate (the…
We study the evolution of asexual microorganisms with small mutation rate in fluctuating environments, and develop techniques that allow us to expand the formal solution of the evolution equations to first order in the mutation rate. Our…
The characterization of plasticity, robustness, and evolvability, an important issue in biology, is studied in terms of phenotypic fluctuations. By numerically evolving gene regulatory networks, the proportionality between the phenotypic…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
The tempo and mode of an adaptive process is strongly determined by the structure of the fitness landscape that underlies it. In order to be able to predict evolutionary outcomes (even on the short term), we must know more about the nature…
Evolutionary dynamics and patterns of molecular evolution are strongly influenced by selection on linked regions of the genome, but our quantitative understanding of these effects remains incomplete. Recent work has focused on predicting…
Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…
Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…
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…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
Protein evolution involves mutations occurring across a wide range of time scales. In analogy with disordered systems in statistical physics, this dynamical heterogeneity suggests strong correlations between mutations happening at distinct…
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…
A macroscopic theory for describing cellular states during steady-growth is presented, which is based on the consistency between cellular growth and molecular replication, as well as the robustness of phenotypes against perturbations.…
We consider a fixed size population that undergoes an evolutionary adaptation in the weak mutuation rate limit, which we model as a biased Langevin process in the genotype space. We show analytically and numerically that, if the fitness…
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…