Related papers: Red Queen Coevolution on Fitness Landscapes
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the…
A fitness landscape is a genetic space -- with two genotypes adjacent if they differ in a single locus -- and a fitness function. Evolutionary dynamics produce a flow on this landscape from lower fitness to higher; reaching equilibrium only…
In a co-evolutionary context, the survive probability of individual elements of a system depends on their relation with their neighbors. The natural selection process depends on the whole population, which is determined by local events…
Competitive exclusion, a key principle of ecology, can be generalized to understand many other complex systems. Individuals under surviving pressure tend to be different from others, and correlations among them change correspondingly to the…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…
One strategy for winning a coevolutionary struggle is to evolve rapidly. Most of the literature on host-pathogen coevolution focuses on this phenomenon, and looks for consequent evidence of coevolutionary arms races. An alternative…
Coexistence of individuals with different species or phenotypes is often found in nature in spite of competition between them. Stable coexistence of multiple types of individuals have implications for maintenance of ecological biodiversity…
A central goal in ecology is to understand how biodiversity is maintained. Previous theoretical works have employed the rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game as a toy model, demonstrating that population mobility is crucial in determining the…
We use fitness graphs, or directed cube graphs, for analyzing evolutionary reversibility. The main application is antimicrobial drug resistance. Reversible drug resistance has been observed both clinically and experimentally. If drug…
Boolean networks with canalizing functions are used to model gene regulatory networks. In order to learn how such networks may behave under evolutionary forces, we simulate the evolution of a single Boolean network by means of an adaptive…
Competition between individuals drives the evolution of whole species. Although the fittest individuals survive the longest and produce the most offspring, in some circumstances the resulting species may not be optimally fit. Here, using…
Cumulative cultural evolution is what made humanity to thrive in various ecological and demographic environments. Solutions to the tasks that humans needed to solve could be mapped onto a task space which could take the form of either…
Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…
Prevalence of cooperation within groups of selfish individuals is puzzling in that it contradicts with the basic premise of natural selection. Favoring players with higher fitness, the latter is key for understanding the challenges faced by…
A quasispecies evolving on a fitness landscape with a single peak of fluctuating height is studied. In the approximation that back mutations can be ignored, the rate equations can be solved analytically. It is shown that the error threshold…
The puzzle associated with the cost of sex, an old problem of evolutionary biology, is discussed here from the point of view of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. The results suggest, in a simplified model, that the prevalence of sexual…
We analyze a stylized model of co-evolution between any two purely competing species (e.g., host and parasite), both sexually reproducing. Similarly to a recent model of Livnat \etal~\cite{evolfocs14} the fitness of an individual depends on…
Coevolutionary games cast players that may change their strategies as well as their networks of interaction. In this paper a framework is introduced for describing coevolutionary game dynamics by landscape models. It is shown that…
Complex networks often exhibit co-evolutionary dynamics, meaning that the network topology and the state of nodes or links are coupled, affecting each other in overlapping time scales. We focus on the co-evolutionary dynamics of online…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…