Related papers: Landscape construction in non-gradient dynamics: A…
Some biologists accept Wright's adaptive landscape idea, believing it is one of most profound concepts in evolutionary dynamics. Some wouldn't, believing that "the idea that there is such a quantity remains one of the most widely held…
Quantifying the adaptive landscape in a given dynamical processes has been one of most important goals in theoretical biology. It can have immediate implications for many dynamical properties, such as robustness and plasticity. Based on…
Two giants of evolutionary theory, Sewall Wright and R. A. Fisher, fought bitterly for over thirty years. The Wright-Fisher controversy forms a cornerstone of the history and philosophy of biology. I argue that the standard interpretations…
Evolutionary adaptation is the process that increases the fit of a population to the fitness landscape it inhabits. As a consequence, evolutionary dynamics is shaped, constrained, and channeled, by that fitness landscape. Much work has been…
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…
The basic mechanics of evolution have been understood since Darwin. But debate continues over whether macroevolutionary phenomena are driven primary by the fitness structure of genotype space or by ecological interaction. In this paper we…
Landscape is one of the key notions in literature on biological processes and physics of complex systems with both deterministic and stochastic dynamics. The large deviation theory (LDT) provides a possible mathematical basis for the…
Here we postulate three laws which form a mathematical framework to capture the essence of Darwinian evolutionary dynamics. The second law is most quantitative and is explicitly expressed by a unique form of stochastic differential…
Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…
Background: The accumulation of deleterious mutations of a population directly contributes to the fate as to how long the population would exist. Muller's ratchet provides a quantitative framework to study the effect of accumulation.…
In evolution theory the concept of a fitness landscape has played an important role, evolution itself being portrayed as a hill-climbing process on a rugged landscape. In this article it is shown that in general, in the presence of other…
We study in detail a recently proposed simple discrete model for evolution on smooth landscapes. An asymptotic solution of this model for long times is constructed. We find that the dynamics of the population are governed by correlation…
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…
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 tempo and mode of an adaptive process is strongly determined by the structure of the fitness landscape that underlies it. In order to be able to predict evolutionary outcomes (even on the short term), we must know more about the nature…
Evolving systems, be it an antibody repertoire in the face of mutating pathogens or a microbial population exposed to varied antibiotics, constantly search for adaptive solutions in time-varying fitness landscapes. Generalists correspond to…
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…
A recently developed treatment of stochastic processes leads to the construction of a potential landscape for the dynamical evolution of complex systems. Since the existence of a potential function in generic settings has been frequently…
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…
The concept of fitness is introduced, and a simple derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (which states that the average fitness of a population increases if its variance is nonzero) is given. After a short discussion of…