Related papers: Purifying selection, drift and reversible mutation…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
One of the key difficulties in using estimation-of-distribution algorithms is choosing the population size(s) appropriately: Too small values lead to genetic drift, which can cause enormous difficulties. In the regime with no genetic drift,…
Variation and selection are the core principles of Darwinian evolution, yet quantitatively relating the diversity of a population to its capacity to respond to selection is challenging. Here, we examine this problem at a molecular level in…
We study the genealogical distance of two randomly chosen individuals in a population that evolves according to a two type Moran model with mutation and selection. We prove that this distance is stochastically smaller than the corresponding…
Demographic models built from genetic data play important roles in illuminating prehistorical events and serving as null models in genome scans for selection. We introduce an inference method based on the joint frequency spectrum of genetic…
Neutral evolution assumes that there are no selective forces distinguishing different variants in a population. Despite this striking assumption, many recent studies have sought to assess whether neutrality can provide a good description of…
Competition between random genetic drift and natural selection plays a central role in evolution: Whereas non-beneficial mutations often prevail in small populations by chance, mutations that sweep through large populations typically confer…
The evolution of dispersal is a classical question in evolutionary ecology, which has been widely studied with several mathematical models. The main question is to define the fittest dispersal rate for a population in a bounded domain, and,…
Two major sources of stochasticity in the dynamics of neutral alleles result from resampling of finite populations (genetic drift) and the random genetic background of nearby selected alleles on which the neutral alleles are found (linked…
This is an introductory review of deterministic mutation-selection models for asexual populations (i.e., quasispecies theory) and related topics. First, the basic concepts of fitness, mutations, and sequence space are introduced. Different…
The distribution of genetic polymorphisms in a population contains information about the mutation rate and the strength of natural selection at a locus. Here, we show that the Poisson Random Field (PRF) method of population-genetic…
Natural selection explains how life has evolved over millions of years from more primitive forms. The speed at which this happens, however, has sometimes defied formal explanations when based on random (uniformly distributed) mutations.…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…
The accumulation of beneficial mutations on many competing genetic backgrounds in rapidly adapting populations has a striking impact on evolutionary dynamics. This effect, known as clonal interference, causes erratic fluctuations in the…
The spread of synthetic gene drives is often discussed in the context of panmictic populations connected by gene flow and described with simple deterministic models. Under such assumptions, an entire species could be altered by releasing a…
Deterministic evolutionary theory robustly predicts that populations displaying altruistic behaviours will be driven to extinction by mutant cheats that absorb common benefits but do not themselves contribute. Here we show that when…
Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…
Recruitment dynamics, or the distribution of the number of offspring among individuals, is central for understanding ecology and evolution. Sweepstakes reproduction (heavy right-tailed offspring number distribution) is central for…