Related papers: Neutral selection
Similarity of competitors has been proposed to facilitate coexistence of species because it slows down competitive exclusion, thus making it easier for equalizing mechanisms to maintain diverse communities. On the other hand, chaos can…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
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…
Consider a mathematical model of evolutionary adaptation of fitness landscape and mutation matrix as a reaction to population changes. As a basis, we use an open quasispecies model, which is modified to include explicit death flow. We…
We consider a integro-differential nonlinear model that describes the evolution of a population structured by a quantitative trait. The interactions between traits occur from competition for resources whose concentrations depend on the…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
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…
The process of `Evolutionary Diffusion', i.e. reproduction with local mutation but without selection in a biological population, resembles standard Diffusion in many ways. However, Evolutionary Diffusion allows the formation of local peaks…
A fundamental problem in the fields of population genetics, evolution, and community ecology, is the fate of a single mutant, or invader, introduced in a finite population of wild types. For a fixed-size community of $N$ individuals, with…
It has been hypothesized that one of the main reasons evolution has been able to produce such impressive adaptations is because it has improved its own ability to evolve -- "the evolution of evolvability". Rupert Riedl, for example, an…
When biological populations expand into new territory, the evolutionary outcomes can be strongly influenced by genetic drift, the random fluctuations in allele frequencies. Meanwhile, spatial variability in the environment can also…
We study a version of the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology redefined in a phenotype space where mutants have properties correlated to their parents. The model has individual-based dynamics whilst incorporating species scale…
We study communities emerging from generalised random Lotka--Volterra dynamics with a large number of species with interactions determined by the degree of niche overlap. Each species is endowed with a number of traits, and competition…
A quasispecies is a set of interrelated genotypes that have reached a situation of equilibrium while evolving according to the usual Darwinian principles of selection and mutation. Quasispecies studies invariably assume that it is possible…
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,…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
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…
We compare and contrast the long-time dynamical properties of two individual-based models of biological coevolution. Selection occurs via multispecies, stochastic population dynamics with reproduction probabilities that depend nonlinearly…
We propose a simple model for genetic adaptation to a changing environment, describing a fitness landscape characterized by two maxima. One is associated with "specialist" individuals that are adapted to the environment; this maximum moves…
We introduce a simple ecological model describing the spatial organization of two interacting populations whose individuals are indifferent to conspecifics and avoid the proximity to heterospecifics. At small population densities $\Phi$ a…