Related papers: Speeding up evolutionary search by small fitness f…
Environmental variability greatly influences the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a population, i.e. it affects how its size and composition evolve. Here, we study a well-mixed population of finite and fluctuating size whose growth is limited…
The concept of fitness is introduced, and a simple derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (which states that the average fitness of a population increases if its variance is nonzero) is given. After a short discussion of…
We look at the interaction of dispersal and environmental stochasticity in $n$-patch models. We are able to prove persistence and extinction results even in the setting when the dispersal rates are stochastic. As applications we look at…
We study the role of recombination, as practiced by genetically-competent bacteria, in speeding up Darwinian evolution. This is done by adding a new process to a previously-studied Markov model of evolution on a smooth fitness landscape;…
This paper introduces a variational formulation of natural selection, paying special attention to the nature of "things" and the way that different "kinds" of "things" are individuated from - and influence - each other. We use the Bayesian…
We derived a new speed limit in population dynamics, which is a fundamental limit on the evolutionary rate. By splitting the contributions of selection and mutation to the evolutionary rate, we obtained the new bound on the speed of…
A fitness landscape is a genetic space -- with two genotypes adjacent if they differ in a single locus -- and a fitness function. Evolutionary dynamics produce a flow on this landscape from lower fitness to higher; reaching equilibrium only…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
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…
The effect of phenotypic plasticity on evolution, the so-called Baldwin effect, has been studied extensively for more than 100 years. Plasticity is known to influence the speed of evolution towards a specific genetic configuration, but…
We consider an individual-based spatially structured population for Darwinian evolution in an asexual population. The individuals move randomly on a bounded continuous space according to a reflected brownian motion. The dynamics involves…
In ecology, species can mitigate their extinction risks in uncertain environments by diversifying individual phenotypes. This observation is quantified by the theory of bet-hedging, which provides a reason for the degree of phenotypic…
The interplay between energy efficiency and evolutionary mechanisms is addressed. One important question is how evolutionary mechanisms can select for the optimised usage of energy in situations where it does not lead to immediate…
Recent microbial experiments suggest that enhanced genetic drift at the frontier of a two-dimensional range expansion can cause genetic sectoring patterns with fractal domain boundaries. Here, we propose and analyze a simple model of…
We investigate the evolutionary rescue of a microbial population in a gradually deteriorating environment, through a combination of analytical calculations and stochastic simulations. We consider a population destined for extinction in the…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
We discuss the population dynamics with selection and random diffusion, keeping the total population constant, in a fitness landscape associated with Constraint Satisfaction, a paradigm for difficult optimization problems. We obtain a phase…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
Single-cell experiments revealed substantial variability in generation times, growth rates but also in birth and division sizes between genetically identical cells. Understanding how these fluctuations determine the fitness of the…