Related papers: Purifying selection, drift and reversible mutation…

The genetic composition of a naturally developing population is considered as due to mutation, selection, genetic drift and recombination. Selection is modeled as single-locus terms (additive fitness) and two-loci terms (pairwise epistatic…

Evolutionary forces shape patterns of genetic diversity within populations and contribute to phenotypic variation. In particular, recurrent positive selection has attracted significant interest in both theoretical and empirical studies.…

Cryptic genetic sequences have attenuated effects on phenotypes. In the classic view, relaxed selection allows cryptic genetic diversity to build up across individuals in a population, providing alleles that may later contribute to…

Several groups have recently modeled evolutionary transitions from an ancestral allele to a beneficial allele separated by one or more intervening mutants. The beneficial allele can become fixed if a succession of intermediate mutants are…

Populations are made up of an integer number of individuals and are subject to stochastic birth-death processes whose rates may vary in time. Useful quantities, like the chance of ultimate fixation, satisfy an appropriate difference…

We consider population dynamics as implemented by the cloning algorithm for analysis of large deviations of time-averaged quantities. Using the simple symmetric exclusion process as a prototypical example, we investigate the convergence of…

We study a family of selection-mutation models of a sexual population structured by a phenotypical trait. The main feature of these models is the asymmetric trait heredity or fecundity between the parents : we assume that each individual…

In this paper we study a class of stochastic individual-based models that describe the evolution of haploid populations where each individual is characterised by a phenotype and a genotype. The phenotype of an individual determines its…

Intraspecific trait variation has been increasingly recognized as an important factor in determining species interaction and diversity. Eco-evolutionary models have studied the distribution of trait values within a population that changes…

Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…

How fast does a population evolve from one fitness peak to another? We study the dynamics of evolving, asexually reproducing populations in which a certain number of mutations jointly confer a fitness advantage. We consider the time until a…

We study the response of a quantitative trait to exponential directional selection in a finite haploid population at the genetic and the phenotypic level. We assume an infinite sites model, in which the number of new mutations per…

The search ability of an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) depends on the variation among the individuals in the population. Maintaining an optimal level of diversity in the EA population is imperative to ensure that progress of the EA search is…

With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…

Between-species coevolution, and in particular antagonistic host-parasite coevolution, is a major process shaping within-species diversity. In this paper we investigate the role of various stochastic processes affecting the outcome of the…

Mutations are typically classified by their effects on the nucleotide sequence and by their size. Here, we argue that if our main aim is to understand the effect of mutations on evolutionary outcomes (such as adaptation or speciation), we…

Human populations have a complex history of introgression and of changing population size. Human genetic variation has been affected by both these processes, so that inference of past population size depends upon the pattern of gene flow…

In this paper we explore the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a predator-prey model, where the prey population is structured according to a certain life history trait. The trait distribution within the prey population is the result of interplay…

We introduce a theory of sequential causal inference in which learners in a chain estimate a structural model from their upstream teacher and then pass samples from the model to their downstream student. It extends the population dynamics…

The evolution of complex molecular traits such as disulphide bridges often requires multiple mutations. The intermediate steps in such evolutionary trajectories are likely to be selectively neutral or deleterious. Therefore, large…