Related papers: Stress-Induced Mutagenesis and Complex Adaptation
We investigate a selection-mutation model for the dynamics of technological innovation,a special case of reaction-diffusion equations. Although mutations are assumed to increase the variety of technologies, not their average success…
Adaptation to one environment often results in fitness gains and losses in other conditions. To characterize how these consequences of adaptation depend on the physical similarity between environments, we evolved 180 populations of…
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…
Mitochondrial function relies on the coordinated expression of mitochondrial and nuclear genes, exhibiting remarkable resilience regardless the susceptibility of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to accumulate harmful mutations. A suggested…
A new approach to understanding evolution [Val09], namely viewing it through the lens of computation, has already started yielding new insights, e.g., natural selection under sexual reproduction can be interpreted as the Multiplicative…
We study the evolution of mutation rates for an asexual population living on a static fitness landscape, consisting of multiple peaks forming an evolutionary staircase. The optimal mutation rate is found by maximizing the diffusion towards…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
The coupling between evolutionary and ecological changes (eco-evolutionary dynamics) has been shown to be relevant among diverse species, and is also of interest outside of ecology, i.e. in cancer evolution. These dynamics play an important…
We consider a population model in which the season alternates between winter and summer, and individuals can acquire mutations either that are advantageous in the summer and disadvantageous in the winter, or vice versa. Also, we assume that…
Although many phenotypic traits are determined by a large number of genetic variants, how a polygenic trait adapts in response to the changes in the environment is still poorly understood. Here we study the adaptation dynamics of a…
Life finds a way. For sessile organisms like plants, the need to adapt to changes in the environment is even more poignant. For humanity, the need to develop crops that can grow in diverse environments and feed our growing population is an…
We use traveling-wave theory to derive expressions for the rate of accumulation of deleterious mutations under Muller's ratchet and the speed of adaptation under positive selection in asexual populations. Traveling-wave theory is a…
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…
Despite increasing data from population-wide sequencing studies, the risk for recessive disorders in consanguineous partnerships is still heavily debated. An important aspect that has not sufficiently been investigated theoretically, is the…
Resource are often not uniformly distributed within a population. Spatial variations of concentration of a resource, change the fitness of competing strategies locally. The notion of fitness varying with respect to both genotype and…
The interplay between mutation and selection plays a fundamental role in the behaviour of evolutionary algorithms (EAs). However, this interplay is still not completely understood. This paper presents a rigorous runtime analysis of a…
We investigate the evolution of populations of random Boolean networks under selection for robustness of the dynamics with respect to the perturbation of the state of a node. The fitness landscape contains a huge plateau of maximum fitness…
We consider the effects of social learning on the individual learning and genetic evolution of a colony of artificial agents capable of genetic, individual and social modes of adaptation. We confirm that there is strong selection pressure…