Related papers: The equivalence between weak and strong purifying …

Temporal environmental variations are ubiquitous in nature, yet most of the theoretical works in population genetics and evolution assume fixed environment. Here we analyze the effect of variations in carrying capacity on the fate of a…

In evolutionary algorithms, the fitness of a population increases with time by mutating and recombining individuals and by a biased selection of more fit individuals. The right selection pressure is critical in ensuring sufficient…

Identifying the complete set of functional elements within the human genome would be a windfall for multiple areas of biological research including medicine, molecular biology, and evolution. Complete knowledge of function would aid in the…

With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) form a popular optimisation paradigm inspired by natural evolution. In recent years the field of evolutionary computation has developed a rigorous analytical theory to analyse their runtime on many illustrative…

Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…

In the human genomes, recombination frequency between homologous chromosomes during meiosis is highly correlated with their physical length while it differs significantly when their coding density is considered. Furthermore, it has been…

To understand the effect of assortative mating on the genetic evolution of a population, we consider a finite population in which each individual has a type, determined by a sequence of n diallelic loci. We assume that the population…

We consider neutral evolution of a large population subject to changes in its population size. For a population with a time-variable carrying capacity we have computed the distributions of the total branch lengths of its sample genealogies.…

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…

The vast majority of mutations are deleterious, and are eliminated by purifying selection. Yet in finite asexual populations, purifying selection cannot completely prevent the accumulation of deleterious mutations due to Muller's ratchet:…

In this paper, the replicator dynamics of the two-locus two-allele system under weak mutation and weak selection is investigated in a generation-wise non-overlapping unstructured population of individuals mating at random. Our main finding…

A strong demographic Allee effect in which the expected population growth rate is negative below a certain critical population size can cause high extinction probabilities in small introduced populations. However, many species are…

Recurrent mutations are a common phenomenon in population genetics. They may be at the origin of the fixation of a new genotype, if they give a phenotypic advantage to the carriers of the new mutation. In this paper, we are interested in…

Molecular traits, such as gene expression levels or protein binding affinities, are increasingly accessible to quantitative measurement by modern high-throughput techniques. Such traits measure molecular functions and, from an evolutionary…

The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…

Growing efforts to measure fitness landscapes in molecular and microbial systems are premised on a tight relationship between landscape topography and evolutionary trajectories. This relationship, however, is far from being straightforward:…

Evolutionary game theory is a mathematical approach to studying how social behaviors evolve. In many recent works, evolutionary competition between strategies is modeled as a stochastic process in a finite population. In this context, two…

Deterministic evolutionary theory robustly predicts that populations displaying altruistic behaviours will be driven to extinction by mutant cheats that absorb common benefits but do not themselves contribute. Here we show that when…

Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…