Related papers: Natural selection. II. Developmental variability a…
We present a mathematical simplification for the evolutionary dynamics of a heritable trait within a two-sex population. This trait is assumed to control the timing of sex-specific life-history events, such as the age of sexual maturity and…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
Languages and genes are both transmitted from generation to generation, with opportunity for differential reproduction and survivorship of forms. Here we apply a rigorous inference framework, drawn from population genetics, to distinguish…
Non-genetic perturbations, such as environmental change or developmental noise, can induce novel phenotypes. If an induced phenotype confers a fitness advantage, selection may promote its genetic stabilization. Non-genetic perturbations can…
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.…
Diversity is an important factor in evolutionary algorithms to prevent premature convergence towards a single local optimum. In order to maintain diversity throughout the process of evolution, various means exist in literature. We analyze…
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…
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
Darwinian evolution can be illustrated as an uphill walk in a landscape, where the surface consists of genotypes, the height coordinates represent fitness, and each step corresponds to a point mutation. Epistasis, roughly defined as the…
Functional effects of different mutations are known to combine to the total effect in highly nontrivial ways. For the trait under evolutionary selection (`fitness'), measured values over all possible combinations of a set of mutations yield…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection states that the rate of change in a population's mean fitness equals its additive genetic variance in fitness. This implies that mean fitness should not decline in a constant environment,…
We investigate a model of evolutionary dynamics on a smooth landscape which features a ``mutator'' allele whose effect is to increase the mutation rate. We show that the expected proportion of mutators far from equilibrium, when the fitness…
Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…
The factors that influence genetic architecture shape the structure of the fitness landscape, and therefore play a large role in the evolutionary dynamics. Here the NK model is used to investigate how epistasis and pleiotropy -- key…
The evolutionary origins of structural features in reconstructed gene-regulatory networks (GRNs) remain poorly understood, especially given the random aspects of gene expression. Here, we extend a classical model of GRN evolution to allow a…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…
Biological systems must be robust for stable function against perturbations, but robustness alone is not sufficient. The ability to switch between appropriate states (phenotypes) in response to different conditions is essential for…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…