Related papers: Speeding up evolutionary search by small fitness f…
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…
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…
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…
Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…
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,…
We consider the evolution of large but finite populations on arbitrary fitness landscapes. We describe the evolutionary process by a Markov, Moran process. We show that to $\mathcal O(1/N)$, the time-averaged fitness is lower for the finite…
Due to stochastic fluctuations arising from finite population size, known as genetic drift, the ability of a population to explore a rugged fitness landscape depends on its size. In the weak mutation regime, while the mean steady-state…
We consider an asexual population under strong selection-weak mutation conditions evolving on rugged fitness landscapes with many local fitness peaks. Unlike the previous studies in which the initial fitness of the population is assumed to…
Many physical and natural systems, including the population of species, evolve in habitats with spatial stochastic variations of the individuals' motility. We study here the effect of those fluctuations on invasion and genetic loss. A…
We consider the evolutionary trajectories traced out by an infinite population undergoing mutation-selection dynamics in static, uncorrelated random fitness landscapes. Starting from the population that consists of a single genotype, the…
The adaptation rate in theoretical models of biological evolution increases with the mutation rate but only to a point when mutations into lethal states cause extinction. One would expect that removing such states should be beneficial for…
Background: Recent experimental and theoretical studies have shown that small asexual populations evolving on complex fitness landscapes may achieve a higher fitness than large ones due to the increased heterogeneity of adaptive…
We study the evolution of large but finite asexual populations evolving in fitness landscapes in which all mutations are either neutral or strongly deleterious. We demonstrate that despite the absence of higher fitness genotypes, adaptation…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Biological populations are subject to two types of noise: demographic stochasticity due to fluctuations in the reproductive success of individuals, and environmental variations that affect coherently the relative fitness of entire…
We derive an expression for the variation between parallel trajectories in phenotypic evolution, extending the well known result that predicts the mean evolutionary path in adaptive dynamics or quantitative genetics. We show how this…
Darwinian evolution can be modeled in general terms as a flow in the space of fitness (i.e. reproductive rate) distributions. In the diffusion approximation, Tsimring et al. have showed that this flow admits "fitness wave" solutions:…