Related papers: Repeatability of evolution on epistatic landscapes
We consider the evolution of large but finite populations on arbitrary fitness landscapes. We describe the evolutionary process by a Markov, Moran process. We show that to $\mathcal O(1/N)$, the time-averaged fitness is lower for the finite…
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…
Modern biomedicine is challenged to predict the effects of genetic variation. Systematic functional assays of point mutants of proteins have provided valuable empirical information, but vast regions of sequence space remain unexplored.…
Adaptation is a central topic in theoretical biology, of practical importance for analyzing drug resistance mutations. Several authors have used arguments based on extreme value theory in their work on adaptation. There are complications…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
It is likely that the strength of selection acting upon a mutation varies through time due to changes in the environment. However, most population genetic theory assumes that the strength of selection remains constant. Here we investigate…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
We are interested in the impact of natural selection in a prey-predator community. We introduce an individual-based model of the community that takes into account both prey and predator phenotypes. Our aim is to understand the phenotypic…
It is known that learning of players who interact in a repeated game can be interpreted as an evolutionary process in a population of ideas. These analogies have so far mostly been established in deterministic models, and memory loss in…
Darwinian evolution can be modeled in general terms as a flow in the space of fitness (i.e. reproductive rate) distributions. In the diffusion approximation, Tsimring et al. have showed that this flow admits "fitness wave" solutions:…
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…
Existing theoretical models of evolution focus on the relative fitness advantages of different mutants in a population while the dynamic behavior of the population size is mostly left unconsidered. We here present a generic stochastic model…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
Evolutionary game dynamics describes the spreading of successful strategies in a population of reproducing individuals. Typically, the microscopic definition of strategy spreading is stochastic, such that the dynamics becomes deterministic…
The ability to absorb mutations while retaining structure and function, or mutational robustness, is a remarkable property of natural proteins. In this Letter, we use a computational model of organismic evolution [Zeldovich et al, PLOS Comp…
Feature selection is one of the most challenging issues in machine learning, especially while working with high dimensional data. In this paper, we address the problem of feature selection and propose a new approach called Evolving Fast and…
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.…
Weak purifying selection, acting on many linked mutations, may play a major role in shaping patterns of molecular evolution in natural populations. Yet efforts to infer these effects from DNA sequence data are limited by our incomplete…
Since protein mutations are the main driving force of evolution at the molecular level, a proper analysis of them (and the factors controlling them) will enable us to find a response to several crucial queries in evolutionary biology. Among…
Experimental studies on enzyme evolution show that only a small fraction of all possible mutation trajectories are accessible to evolution. However, these experiments deal with individual enzymes and explore a tiny part of the fitness…