Related papers: The evolution of genetic architectures underlying …
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…
The rise of trait-based ecology has led to an increased focus on the distribution and dynamics of traits in communities. However, a general theory of trait-based ecology, that can apply across different scales (e.g., species that differ in…
Genotype-phenotype (GP) maps specify how the random mutations that change genotypes generate variation by altering phenotypes, which, in turn, can trigger selection. Many GP maps share the following general properties: 1) The number of…
Population genetics lies at the heart of evolutionary theory. This topic forms part of many biological science curricula but is rarely taught to physics students. Since physicists are becoming increasingly interested in biological…
Causal inference approaches in systems genetics exploit quantitative trait loci (QTL) genotypes to infer causal relationships among phenotypes. The genetic architecture of each phenotype may be complex, and poorly estimated genetic…
We consider a population with non-overlapping generations, whose size goes to infinity. It is described by a discrete genealogy which may be time non-homogeneous and we pay special attention to branching trees in varying environments. A…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
There have been many studies to examine whether one trait is correlated with another trait across a group of present-day species (for example, do species with larger brains tend to have longer gestation times. Since the introduction of the…
Simple analytic considerations are applied to recently discovered patterns in a generalized Fisher equation for population dynamics. The generalization consists of the inclusion of non-local competition interactions among individuals. We…
Most of the problems in genetic algorithms are very complex and demand a large amount of resources that current technology can not offer. Our purpose was to develop a Java-JINI distributed library that implements Genetic Algorithms with…
The contribution to an organism's phenotype from one genetic locus may depend upon the status of other loci. Such epistatic interactions among loci are now recognized as fundamental to shaping the process of adaptation in evolving…
Understanding which phenotypic traits are consistently correlated throughout evolution is a highly pertinent problem in modern evolutionary biology. Here, we propose a multivariate phylogenetic latent liability model for assessing the…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
Topological features of gene regulatory networks can be successfully reproduced by a model population evolving under selection for short dynamical attractors. The evolved population of networks exhibit motif statistics, summarized by…
In this paper we investigate a neural network model in which weights between computational nodes are modified according to a local learning rule. To determine whether local learning rules are sufficient for learning, we encode the network…
We propose a mathematical framework for natural selection in finite populations. Traditionally, many of the selection-based processes used to describe cultural and genetic evolution (such as imitation and birth-death models) have been…
A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…
In a mouse intercross with more than 500 animals and genome-wide gene expression data on six tissues, we identified a high proportion (18%) of sample mix-ups in the genotype data. Local expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL; genetic loci…
In ecology and population dynamics, gene-flow refers to the transfer of a trait from one population to another. This phenomenon appears in studying the evolution of social features, such as languages. From the mathematical point of view,…
We obtain general inequalities constraining the difference between the average of an arbitrary function of a phenotypic trait, which includes the fitness landscape of the trait itself, in the presence or in the absence of natural selection.…