Related papers: Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvabilit…
We study the evolution of large but finite asexual populations evolving in fitness landscapes in which all mutations are either neutral or strongly deleterious. We demonstrate that despite the absence of higher fitness genotypes, adaptation…
Evolution by Natural Selection is a process by which progeny inherit some properties from their progenitors with small variation. These properties are subject to Natural Selection and are called adaptive traits and carriers of the latter…
An increasing number of dissident voices claim that the standard neo-Darwinian view of genes as 'leaders' and phenotypes as 'followers' during the process of adaptive evolution should be turned on its head. This idea is older than 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…
The evolutionary dynamics of molecular populations are strongly dependent on the structure of genotype spaces. The map between genotype and phenotype determines how easily genotype spaces can be navigated and the accessibility of…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
Valiant's (2007) model of evolvability models the evolutionary process of acquiring useful functionality as a restricted form of learning from random examples. Linear threshold functions and their various subclasses, such as conjunctions…
The evolution of the biosphere unfolds as a luxuriant generative process of new living forms and functions. Organisms adapt to their environment, exploit novel opportunities that are created in this continuous blooming dynamics. Affordances…
The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, we propose a new computational method to investigate the particularities of evolution. Second, we apply this method to a model of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) and explore the evolution of…
The co-evolution of structure and dynamics, known as adaptivity, is a fundamental property in various systems and drives diverse emergent behaviors. However, the adaptivity in previous works is primarily stemmed from pairwise situations,…
The structure of ecological networks, in particular food webs, determines their ability to evolve further, i.e. evolvability. The knowledge about how food web evolvability is determined by the structures of diverse ecological networks can…
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…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
Phenotypic plasticity and its evolution may help evolutionary rescue in a novel and stressful environment, especially if environmental novelty reveals cryptic genetic variation that enables the evolution of increased plasticity. However,…
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,…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…
The existence of complex (multiple-step) genetic adaptations that are "irreducible" (i.e., all partial combinations are less fit than the original genotype) is one of the longest standing problems in evolutionary biology. In standard…
The emerging field of high-throughput compartmentalized in vitro evolution is a promising new approach to protein engineering. In these experiments, libraries of mutant genotypes are randomly distributed and expressed in microscopic…
Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…
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…