Related papers: Natural selection. I. Variable environments and un…
A population of individuals with the same genes can present heterogeneous traits (phenotypes). The prevalence of this heterogeneity can be explained as a bet-hedging strategy that improves the population proliferation rate (fitness) in…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
Evolvability is defined as the ability of a population to generate heritable variation to facilitate its adaptation to new environments or selection pressures. In this article, we consider evolvability as a phenotypic trait subject to…
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…
Many biological populations exhibit diversity in their strategy for survival and reproduction in a given environment, and microbes are an example. We explore the fate of different strategies under sustained environmental change by…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…
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…
In contrast to the neutral population cycles of the deterministic mean-field Lotka--Volterra rate equations, including spatial structure and stochastic noise in models for predator-prey interactions yields complex spatio-temporal structures…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
Biological fitness is not an observable quantity and must be inferred from population dynamics. Bayesian inference applied to the Moran process and variants yields a robust inference method that can infer fitness in populations evolving via…
Competition between individuals drives the evolution of whole species. Although the fittest individuals survive the longest and produce the most offspring, in some circumstances the resulting species may not be optimally fit. Here, using…
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…
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…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
In many biological processes, the size of a population changes stochastically with time, and recent work in the context of cancer and bacterial growth have focused on the situation when the mean population size grows exponentially. Here,…
Reproducibility, the ability to recompute results, and replicability, the chances other experimenters will achieve a consistent result, are two foundational characteristics of successful scientific research. Consistent findings from…
On average men are taller and more muscular than women, which confers on them advantages related to female choice and during physical competition with other men. Sexual size dimorphisms such as these come with vulnerabilities due to higher…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
The adaptive evolution of a population under the influence of mutation and selection is strongly influenced by the structure of the underlying fitness landscape, which encodes the interactions between mutations at different genetic loci.…