Related papers: Evolutionary accessibility of mutational pathways
Biological systems are modular, and this modularity affects the evolution of biological systems over time and in different environments. We here develop a theory for the dynamics of evolution in a rugged, modular fitness landscape. We show…
The protein folding problem has attracted an increasing attention from physicists. The problem has a flavor of statistical mechanics, but possesses the most common feature of most biological problems -- the profound effects of evolution. I…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
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…
Identifying and quantifying the benefits of sex and recombination is a long standing problem in evolutionary theory. In particular, contradictory claims have been made about the existence of a benefit of recombination on high dimensional…
Intransitivity is supposed to be a main reason for deficits in coevolutionary progress and inheritable superiority. Besides, coevolutionary dynamics is characterized by interactions yielding subjective fitness, but aiming at solutions that…
Recent years have witnessed an exceptional extension of public transportation networks in People's Republic of China, both at a national scale with the construction of the first HSR railway network of the world, and at local scales with…
Evolutionary adaptation is often likened to climbing a hill or peak. While this process is simple for fitness landscapes where mutations are independent, the interaction between mutations (epistasis) as well as mutations at loci that affect…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
The evolution model with parallel mutation-selection scheme is solved for the case when selection is accompanied by base substitutions, insertions, and deletions. The fitness is assumed to be either a single-peak function (i.e., having one…
Plant breeding programs use data obtained from multi-environment selection experiments to produce improved varieties with the ultimate aim of maintaining high levels of genetic gain. Selection accuracy can be improved with the use of…
We address a primary question of computational as well as biological research on evolution: How can an exploration strategy adapt in such a way as to exploit the information gained about the problem at hand? We first introduce an integrated…
The exploration of vast genotype spaces poses fundamental challenges for evolving populations. As the number of genotypes encoding viable phenotypes grows exponentially with genome length, populations can only explore a tiny fraction of…
Invasion fronts in ecology are well studied but very few mathematical results concern the case with variable motility (possibly due to mutations). Based on an apparently simple reaction-diffusion equation, we explain the observed phenomena…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of a finite population of sequences adapting to NK fitness landscapes. We find that, unlike in the case of an infinite population, the average fitness in a finite population is maximized at a small…
Genetic hitchhiking describes evolution at a neutral locus that is linked to a selected locus. If a beneficial allele rises to fixation at the selected locus, a characteristic polymorphism pattern (so-called selective sweep) emerges at the…
We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…
Neutral landscapes and mutational robustness are believed to be important enablers of evolvability in biology. We apply these concepts to software, defining mutational robustness to be the fraction of random mutations that leave a program's…
Genotype-to-phenotype mappings translate genotypic variations such as mutations into phenotypic changes. Neutrality is the observation that some mutations do not lead to phenotypic changes. Studying the search trajectories in genotypic and…