Related papers: Speeding up evolutionary search by small fitness f…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
Range expansion and range shifts are crucial population responses to climate change. Genetic consequences are not well understood but are clearly coupled to ecological dynamics that, in turn, are driven by shifting climate conditions. We…
We consider the adaptation dynamics of an asexual population that walks uphill on a rugged fitness landscape which is endowed with large number of local fitness peaks. We work in a parameter regime where only those mutants that are single…
When a biological population expands into new territory, genetic drift develops an enormous influence on evolution at the propagating front. In such range expansion processes, fluctuations in allele frequencies occur through stochastic…
Given an endogenous timescale set by invasion in a constant environment, we introduced periodic temporal variation in competitive superiority by alternating the species' propagation rates. By manipulating habitat size and introduction rate,…
We analyse a non-local parabolic integro-differential equation modelling the evolutionary dynamics of a phenotypically-structured population in a changing environment. Such models arise in a variety of contexts from climate change to…
We study the evolution of mutation rates for an asexual population living on a static fitness landscape, consisting of multiple peaks forming an evolutionary staircase. The optimal mutation rate is found by maximizing the diffusion towards…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
To our knowledge, the populations are generally assumed to be homogeneous in the traditional approach to evolutionary game dynamics. Here, we focus on the inhomogeneous populations. A simple model which can describe the inhomogeneity of the…
We propose a minimal model to simulate long waiting times followed by evolutionary bursts on rugged landscapes. It combines point and inversions-like mutations as sources of genetic variation. The inversions are intended to simulate one of…
Game theory ideas provide a useful framework for studying evolutionary dynamics in a well-mixed environment. This approach, however, typically enforces a strictly fixed overall population size, deemphasizing natural growth processes. We…
Our theoretical understanding of crossover is limited by our ability to analyze how population diversity evolves. In this study, we provide one of the first rigorous analyses of population diversity and optimization time in a setting where…
In large asexual populations, beneficial mutations have to compete with each other for fixation. Here, I derive explicit analytic expressions for the rate of substitution and the mean beneficial effect of fixed mutations, under the…
Adaptation in a fluctuating environment is a process of fueling environmental information to gain fitness. Living systems have gradually developed strategies for adaptation from random and passive diversification of the phenotype to more…
We introduce a model to study the impact of catastrophes on evolutionary paths. If we do not allow catastrophes the number of changes in the maximum fitness of a population grows logarithmically with respect to time. Allowing catastrophes…
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…
The fitness landscape encodes the mapping of genotypes to fitness and provides a succinct representation of possible trajectories followed by an evolving population. Evolutionary accessibility is quantified by the existence of…
We investigate travelling wave solutions in reaction-diffusion models of animal range expansion in the case that population diffusion is density-dependent. We find that the speed of the selected wave depends critically on the strength of…
Stronger selection implies faster evolution---that is, the greater the force, the faster the change. This apparently self-evident proposition, however, is derived under the assumption that genetic variation within a population is primarily…