Related papers: Natural selection. I. Variable environments and un…
The probability that the frequency of a particular trait will eventually become unity, the so-called fixation probability, is a central issue in the study of population evolution. Its computation, once we are given a stochastic finite…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
A key question in biological systems is whether genetic diversity persists in the long run under evolutionary competition or whether a single dominant genotype emerges. Classic work by Kalmus in 1945 has established that even in simple…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
This paper shows that differentiating the lifetimes of two phenotypes independently from their fertility can lead to a qualitative change in the equilibrium of a population: since survival and reproduction are distinct functional aspects of…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
We consider a version of large population games whose agents compete for resources using strategies with adaptable preferences. The games can be used to model economic markets, ecosystems or distributed control. Diversity of initial…
We investigate the exploration of rugged fitness landscapes by spatially structured populations with demes on the nodes of a graph, connected by migrations. In the rare migration regime, we find that finite structures can adapt more…
Evolution depends on the fitness of organisms, the expected rate of reproducing. Directly getting offspring is the most basic form of fitness, but fitness can also be increased indirectly by helping genetically related individuals (such as…
Competition between species and genotypes is a dominant factor in a variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Biological dynamics are typically highly stochastic, and therefore, analyzing a competitive system requires accounting for…
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…
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…
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…
In their well-known textbook (Vincent & Brown, 2005), Vincent and Brown suggested an attractive approach for studying evolutionary dynamics of populations that are heterogeneous with respect to some strategy that affects the fitness of…
Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…
In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…
We consider a spatial (line) model for invasion of a population by a single mutant with a stochastically selectively neutral fitness landscape, independent from the fitness landscape for non-mutants. This model is similar to those…
The very insightful Trivers-Willard hypothesis, proposed in the early 1970s, states that females in good physiological conditions are more likely to produce male offspring, when the variance of reproductive success amongst males is high. A…
The accumulation of deleterious mutations is driven by rare fluctuations which lead to the loss of all mutation free individuals, a process known as Muller's ratchet. Even though Muller's ratchet is a paradigmatic process in population…
We study the adaptation dynamics of a maladapted asexual population on rugged fitness landscapes with many local fitness peaks. The distribution of beneficial fitness effects is assumed to belong to one of the three extreme value domains,…