Related papers: Stress-Induced Mutagenesis and Complex Adaptation

Evolutionary graph theory is a well established framework for modelling the evolution of social behaviours in structured populations. An emerging consensus in this field is that graphs that exhibit heterogeneity in the number of connections…

How individuals adapt their behavior in cultural evolution remains elusive. Theoretical studies have shown that the update rules chosen to model individual decision making can dramatically modify the evolutionary outcome of the population…

A common assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing evolution of complexity appear more nuanced. Evolution is deeply connected to learning, where…

Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming (GGGP) employs a variety of insights from evolutionary theory to autonomously design solutions for a given task. Recent insights from evolutionary biology can lead to further improvements in GGGP…

We introduce a model to study the impact of catastrophes on evolutionary paths. If we do not allow catastrophes the number of changes in the maximum fitness of a population grows logarithmically with respect to time. Allowing catastrophes…

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…

Large sets of genotypes give rise to the same phenotype because phenotypic expression is highly redundant. Accordingly, a population can accept mutations without altering its phenotype, as long as thegenotype mutates into another one on the…

Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…

Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…

Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…

We consider evolution of a large population, where fitness of each organism is defined by many phenotypical traits. These traits result from expression of many genes. We propose a new model of gene regulation, where gene expression is…

We show how concepts from statistical physics, such as order parameter, thermodynamic limit, and quantum phase transition, translate into biological concepts in mutation-selection models for sequence evolution and can be used there. The…

Pervasive natural selection can strongly influence observed patterns of genetic variation, but these effects remain poorly understood when multiple selected variants segregate in nearby regions of the genome. Classical population genetics…

Aging is thought to be a consequence of intrinsic breakdowns in how genetic information is processed. But mounting experimental evidence suggests that aging can be slowed. To help resolve this mystery, I derive a mortality equation which…

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…

In large asexual populations, beneficial mutations have to compete with each other for fixation. Here, I derive explicit analytic expressions for the rate of substitution and the mean beneficial effect of fixed mutations, under the…

In a co-evolutionary context, the survive probability of individual elements of a system depends on their relation with their neighbors. The natural selection process depends on the whole population, which is determined by local events…

Most new mutations are deleterious and are eventually eliminated by natural selection. But in an adapting population, the rapid amplification of beneficial mutations can hinder the removal of deleterious variants in nearby regions of the…

Several growth models have been proposed in the literature for scale-free complex networks, with a range of fitness-based attachment models gaining prominence recently. However, the processes by which such fitness-based attachment behaviour…

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…