Related papers: Evolutionary Fitness in Variable Environments
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
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…
Dormancy is a widespread adaptive strategy that enables populations to persist in fluctuating environments, yet how its benefits depend on the temporal structure of environmental variability remains unclear. We examine how dormancy…
In evolutionary dynamics, a key measure of a mutant trait's success is the probability that it takes over the population given some initial mutant-appearance distribution. This "fixation probability" is difficult to compute in general, as…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
Random walks on multidimensional nonlinear landscapes are of interest in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, properties of adaptive trajectories on fitness landscapes determine population fates and thus play a central role…
In many biological processes, the size of a population changes stochastically with time, and recent work in the context of cancer and bacterial growth have focused on the situation when the mean population size grows exponentially. Here,…
A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…
Many physical and natural systems, including the population of species, evolve in habitats with spatial stochastic variations of the individuals' motility. We study here the effect of those fluctuations on invasion and genetic loss. A…
We study a mutation-selection model with a fluctuating environment. More precisely, individuals in a large population are assumed to have a modifier locus determining the mutation rate $u \in [0,\vartheta]$ at a second locus with types $v…
The impact of environmental variability on population size growth rate in dynamic models is a recurrent issue in the theoretical ecology literature. In the scalar case, R. Lande pointed out that results are ambiguous depending on whether…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
Quantitative single cell measurements have shown that cell cycle duration (the time between cell divisions) for diverse cell types is a noisy variable. The underlying distribution is mean scalable with a universal shape for many cell types…
We report that population dynamics in fluctuating environment accompanies mathematically equivalent structure to steady state thermodynamics. By employing the structure, population growth in fluctuating environment is decomposed into…
The idea of incompetence as a learning or adaptation function was introduced in the context of evolutionary games as a fixed parameter. However, live organisms usually perform different nonlinear adaptation functions such as a power law or…
Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in population fitness are punctuated by sudden innovations, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We use a recent quantitative mathematical analysis of…
Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…
On average men are taller and more muscular than women, which confers on them advantages related to female choice and during physical competition with other men. Sexual size dimorphisms such as these come with vulnerabilities due to higher…
This Letter studies the quasispecies dynamics of a population capable of genetic repair evolving on a time-dependent fitness landscape. We develop a model that considers an asexual population of single-stranded, conservatively replicating…
Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…