Related papers: The phenotypic expansion and its boundaries

The analysis of the demographic transition of the past century and a half, using both empirical data and mathematical models, has rendered a wealth of well-established facts, including the dramatic increases in life expectancy. Despite…

This paper applies existing and new approaches to study trends in the performance of elite athletes over time. We study both track and field scores of men and women athletes on a yearly basis from 2001 to 2019, revealing several trends and…

Phenotypic evolution implies sequential fixations of new genomic sequences. The speed at which these mutations fixate depends, in part, on the relative fitness (selection coefficient) of the mutant vs. the ancestor. Using a simple…

Inspired by the Games held in ancient Greece, modern Olympics represent the world's largest pageant of athletic skill and competitive spirit. Performances of athletes at the Olympic Games mirror, since 1896, human potentialities in sports,…

Athletic performance follows a typical pattern of improvement and decline during a career. This pattern is also often observed within-seasons, as an athlete aims for their performance to peak at key events such as the Olympic Games or World…

Adaptation in a fluctuating environment is a process of fueling environmental information to gain fitness. Living systems have gradually developed strategies for adaptation from random and passive diversification of the phenotype to more…

Biological populations are subject to two types of noise: demographic stochasticity due to fluctuations in the reproductive success of individuals, and environmental variations that affect coherently the relative fitness of entire…

Recent discoveries show steady improvements in life expectancy during modern decades. Does this support that humans continue to live longer in future? We recently put forward the maximum survival tendency, as found in survival curves of…

Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…

One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…

The athletic achievements of African athletes in global running championships have long been subject to scientific and sociological inquiry. During the 1990s, a popular narrative emerged, suggesting that West African lineage conferred…

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…

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…

The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…

Running world records (WRs) contain information about physiological characteristics that determine running performance. The progression of WRs over time encode the evolution of these characteristics. Here we demonstrate that a previously…

World record setting has long attracted public interest and scientific investigation. Extremal records summarize the limits of the space explored by a process, and the historical progression of a record sheds light on the underlying…

We study a minimal model for the growth of a phenotypically heterogeneous population of cells subject to a fluctuating environment in which they can replicate (by exploiting available resources) and modify their phenotype within a given…

The ability of organisms to accurately sense their environment and respond accordingly is critical for evolutionary success. However, exactly how the sensory ability influences fitness is a topic of active research, while the necessity of a…

Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…

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…