Related papers: Satisfiability and Evolution
In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
We present a model for evolving population which maintains genetic polymorphism. By introducing random mutation in the model population at a constant rate, we observe that the population does not become extinct but survives, keeping…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
We deal with the study of the evolution of the allelic frequencies, at a single locus, for a population distributed continuously over a bounded habitat. We consider evolution which occurs under the joint action of selection and arbitrary…
Maintenance of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination imposes physiological costs when compared to parthenogenic reproduction, most prominently: for maintaining the corresponding (molecular) machinery, for finding a mating partner,…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…
It has been a puzzling question why some organisms reproduce sexually. Fisher and Muller hypothesized that reproducing by sex can speed up the evolution. They explained that in the sexual reproduction, recombination can combine beneficial…
We discuss two different ways of chromosomes' and genomes' evolution. Purifying selection dominates in large panmictic populations, where Mendelian law of independent gene assortment is valid. If the populations are small, recombination…
The benefit of sexual recombination is one of the most fundamental questions both in population genetics and evolutionary computation. It is widely believed that recombination helps solving difficult optimization problems. We present the…
We consider the dynamics imposed by natural selection on the populations of two competing, sexually reproducing, haploid species. In this setting, the fitness of any genome varies over time due to the changing population mix of the…
Monotone Boolean functions are a structurally important class of Boolean functions, but their restricted form imposes strong limitations on achievable nonlinearity. In this paper, we investigate whether evolutionary computation can evolve…
Adaptation often involves the acquisition of a large number of genomic changes which arise as mutations in single individuals. In asexual populations, combinations of mutations can fix only when they arise in the same lineage, but for…
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 process of evolutionary diversification unfolds in a vast genotypic space of potential outcomes. During the past century there have been remarkable advances in the development of theory for this diversification, and the theory's success…
Identifying and quantifying the benefits of sex and recombination is a long standing problem in evolutionary theory. In particular, contradictory claims have been made about the existence of a benefit of recombination on high dimensional…
We study a class of evolution models, where the breeding process involves an arbitrary exchangeable process, allowing for mutations to appear. The population size $n$ is fixed, hence after breeding, selection is applied. Individuals are…
We propose a class of evolutionary models that involves an arbitrary exchangeable process as the breeding process and different selection schemes. In those models, a new genome is born according to the breeding process, and then a genome is…
The question as to why most higher organisms reproduce sexually has remained open despite extensive research, and has been called "the queen of problems in evolutionary biology". Theories dating back to Weismann have suggested that the key…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…