Related papers: Evolutionary Predictability and Complications with…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
The adaptation process of a species to a new environment is a significant area of study in biology. As part of natural selection, adaptation is a mutation process which improves survival skills and reproductive functions of species. Here,…
The extent of parallel evolution at the genotypic level is quantitatively linked to the distribution of beneficial fitness effects (DBFE) of mutations. The standard view, based on light-tailed distributions (i.e. distributions with finite…
Variation and selection are the core principles of Darwinian evolution, yet quantitatively relating the diversity of a population to its capacity to respond to selection is challenging. Here, we examine this problem at a molecular level in…
Evolutionary game theory is a successful mathematical framework geared towards understanding the selective pressures that affect the evolution of the strategies of agents engaged in interactions with potential conflicts. While a…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
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…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
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.…
We consider the evolutionary trajectories traced out by an infinite population undergoing mutation-selection dynamics in static, uncorrelated random fitness landscapes. Starting from the population that consists of a single genotype, the…
Darwinian evolution can be illustrated as an uphill walk in a landscape, where the surface consists of genotypes, the height coordinates represent fitness, and each step corresponds to a point mutation. Epistasis, roughly defined as the…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
Random walks on multidimensional nonlinear landscapes are of interest in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, properties of adaptive trajectories on fitness landscapes determine population fates and thus play a central role…
We discuss the feasibility of predicting, managing and subsequently manipulating, the future evolution of a Complex Adaptive System. Our archetypal system mimics a population of adaptive, interacting objects, such as those arising in the…
We study the adaptation dynamics of a maladapted asexual population on rugged fitness landscapes with many local fitness peaks. The distribution of beneficial fitness effects is assumed to belong to one of the three extreme value domains,…
The emergence of a predominant phenotype within a cell population is often triggered by a rare accumulation of DNA mutations in a single cell. For example, tumors may be initiated by a single cell in which multiple mutations cooperate to…
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 examine the feasibility of predicting and subsequently managing the future evolution of a Complex Adaptive System. Our archetypal system mimics a competitive population of mechanical, biological, informational or human objects. We show…
Standing genetic variation provides a rich reservoir of potentially useful mutations facilitating the adaptation to novel environments. Experimental evolution studies have demonstrated that rapid and strong phenotypic responses to selection…
This is an introductory review of deterministic mutation-selection models for asexual populations (i.e., quasispecies theory) and related topics. First, the basic concepts of fitness, mutations, and sequence space are introduced. Different…