Related papers: Evolutionary Fitness in Variable Environments
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
Biological populations are subject to two types of noise: demographic stochasticity due to fluctuations in the reproductive success of individuals, and environmental variations that affect coherently the relative fitness of entire…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
In evolution theory the concept of a fitness landscape has played an important role, evolution itself being portrayed as a hill-climbing process on a rugged landscape. In this article it is shown that in general, in the presence of other…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
We conducted an investigation of the effect that extreme variability of the individual's environment has in the individual's adaptability and, in general, in the co-evolution of a population. First we assume that the individuals are a kind…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
We consider a fixed size population that undergoes an evolutionary adaptation in the weak mutuation rate limit, which we model as a biased Langevin process in the genotype space. We show analytically and numerically that, if the fitness…
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
The concept of fitness is introduced, and a simple derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (which states that the average fitness of a population increases if its variance is nonzero) is given. After a short discussion of…
Environmental variations can significantly influence how populations compete for resources, and hence shape their evolution. Here, we study population dynamics subject to a fluctuating environment modeled by a varying carrying capacity…
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
Adaptation in a fluctuating environment is a process of fueling environmental information to gain fitness. Living systems have gradually developed strategies for adaptation from random and passive diversification of the phenotype to more…
Environmental fluctuations have important consequences in the organization of ecological communities, and understanding how such a variability influences the biodiversity of an ecosystem is a major question in ecology. In this paper, we…