Related papers: Genetic draft, selective interference, and populat…
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,…
We investigate the evolution of populations of random Boolean networks under selection for robustness of the dynamics with respect to the perturbation of the state of a node. The fitness landscape contains a huge plateau of maximum fitness…
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…
In order to analyze data from cancer genome sequencing projects, we need to be able to distinguish causative, or "driver," mutations from "passenger" mutations that have no selective effect. Toward this end, we prove results concerning the…
Our theoretical understanding of crossover is limited by our ability to analyze how population diversity evolves. In this study, we provide one of the first rigorous analyses of population diversity and optimization time in a setting where…
What is a population? This review considers how a population may be defined in terms of understanding the structure of the underlying genetics of the individuals involved. The main approach is to consider statistically identifiable groups…
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,…
Cryptic genetic sequences have attenuated effects on phenotypes. In the classic view, relaxed selection allows cryptic genetic diversity to build up across individuals in a population, providing alleles that may later contribute to…
Migrations have played an important role in shaping the genetic diversity of human populations. Understanding genomic data thus requires careful modeling of historical gene flow. Here we consider the effect of relatively recent population…
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…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
Evolutionary games on graphs describe how strategic interactions and population structure determine evolutionary success, quantified by the probability that a single mutant takes over a population. Graph structures, compared to the…
Genetic diversity is central to the process of evolution. Both natural selection and random genetic drift are influenced by the level of genetic diversity of a population; selection acts on diversity while drift samples from it. At a given…
Stronger selection implies faster evolution---that is, the greater the force, the faster the change. This apparently self-evident proposition, however, is derived under the assumption that genetic variation within a population is primarily…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
We study the stationary state of a population evolving under the action of random genetic drift, selection and recombination in which both deleterious and reverse beneficial mutations can occur. We find that the equilibrium fraction of…
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…
Inference with population genetic data usually treats the population pedigree as a nuisance parameter, the unobserved product of a past history of random mating. However, the history of genetic relationships in a given population is a…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…