Related papers: Polytopes, graphs and fitness landscapes

Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…

Complexity in biology is often described using a multi-map architecture, where the genotype, representing the encoded information, is mapped to the functional level, known as the phenotype, which is then connected to a latent phenotype we…

The adaptation rate in theoretical models of biological evolution increases with the mutation rate but only to a point when mutations into lethal states cause extinction. One would expect that removing such states should be beneficial for…

Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. Human history can be regarded as a sequence of long periods of cultural stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts that transform culture upside-down over the turn of a few…

Experimental studies on enzyme evolution show that only a small fraction of all possible mutation trajectories are accessible to evolution. However, these experiments deal with individual enzymes and explore a tiny part of 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 exploration of vast genotype spaces poses fundamental challenges for evolving populations. As the number of genotypes encoding viable phenotypes grows exponentially with genome length, populations can only explore a tiny fraction of…

Cells use genetic switches to shift between alternate stable gene expression states, e.g., to adapt to new environments or to follow a developmental pathway. Conceptually, these stable phenotypes can be considered as attractive states on an…

Although many phenotypic traits are determined by a large number of genetic variants, how a polygenic trait adapts in response to the changes in the environment is still poorly understood. Here we study the adaptation dynamics of a…

Phylogenies (ancestry trees) depict the evolutionary history of an evolving population. In evolutionary computing, a phylogeny can reveal how an evolutionary algorithm steers a population through a search space, illuminating the…

We derive an expression for the variation between parallel trajectories in phenotypic evolution, extending the well known result that predicts the mean evolutionary path in adaptive dynamics or quantitative genetics. We show how this…

We consider the optimal dynamics in the infinite population evolution models with general symmetric fitness landscape. The search of optimal evolution trajectories are complicated due to sharp transitions (like shock waves) in evolution…

Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…

Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in an evolving population are punctuated by a sudden burst of change, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We analyze the population dynamics for a…

This paper introduces a variational formulation of natural selection, paying special attention to the nature of "things" and the way that different "kinds" of "things" are individuated from - and influence - each other. We use the Bayesian…

Adaptation is a central topic in theoretical biology, of practical importance for analyzing drug resistance mutations. Several authors have used arguments based on extreme value theory in their work on adaptation. There are complications…

An evolutionary search space can be smoothly transformed via a suitable change of basis; however, it can be difficult to determine an appropriate basis. In this paper, a method is proposed to select an optimum basis can be used to simplify…

We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…

Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…

Sewall Wright's adaptive landscape metaphor penetrates a significant part of evolutionary thinking. Supplemented with Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection and Kimura's maximum principle, it provides a unifying and intuitive…