Related papers: Multidimensional epistasis and the transitory adva…
Background: Recent experimental and theoretical studies have shown that small asexual populations evolving on complex fitness landscapes may achieve a higher fitness than large ones due to the increased heterogeneity of adaptive…
The nature of epistasis has important consequences for the evolutionary significance of sex and recombination. Recent efforts to find negative epistasis as source of negative linkage disequilibrium and associated long-term sex advantage…
The evolutionary effect of recombination depends crucially on the epistatic interactions between linked loci. A paradigmatic case where recombination is known to be strongly disadvantageous is a two-locus fitness landscape dis- playing…
This paper suggests that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. With this explanation for the basic cycle, the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution…
We find an advantage of recombination for a category of complex fitness landscapes. Recent studies of empirical fitness landscapes reveal complex gene interactions and multiple peaks, and recombination can be a powerful mechanism for…
Why sex evolved and it prevails in nature remains one of the great puzzles of evolution. Most biologists would explain that it promotes genetic variability, however this explanation suffers from several difficulties. What advantages might…
The adaptive evolution of large asexual populations is generally characterized by competition between clones carrying different beneficial mutations. This interference phenomenon slows down the adaptation speed and makes the theoretical…
Sex in higher diploids carries a two-fold cost of males that should reduce its fitness relative to cloning and result in its extinction. Instead, sex is widespread and it is clonal species that face early obsolescence. One possible reason…
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…
We study the evolution of recombination using a microscopic model developed within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits. Two components of fitness are considered: a static one that describes adaptation to environmental factors not…
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 have analyzed the relations between the mutational pressure, recombination and selection pressure in the bit-string model with sexual reproduction. For specific sets of these parameters we have found three phase transitions with one…
Sex is considered as an evolutionary paradox, since its evolutionary advantage does not necessarily overcome the two fold cost of sharing half of one's offspring's genome with another member of the population. Here we demonstrate that…
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…
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,…
We modify the Penna Model for biological aging, which is based on the mutation-accumulation theory, in order to verify if there would be any evolutionary advantage of triploid over diploid organisms. We show that this is not the case, and…
The long-term growth rate of populations in varying environments quantifies the evolutionary value of processing the information that biological individuals inherit from their ancestors and acquire from their environment. Previous models…
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…
When beneficial mutations are relatively common, competition between multiple unfixed mutations can reduce the rate of fixation in well-mixed asexual populations. We introduce a one dimensional model with a steady accumulation of beneficial…
Sexual reproduction in Nature requires two sexes, which raises the question why the reproductive scheme did not evolve to have three or more sexes. Here we construct a constrained optimization model based on the communication theory to…