Related papers: The Impact of Environmental Fluctuations on Evolut…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Environmental variability greatly influences the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a population, i.e. it affects how its size and composition evolve. Here, we study a well-mixed population of finite and fluctuating size whose growth is limited…
We study how environmental stochasticity influences the long-term population size in certain one- and two-species models. The difficulty is that even when one can prove that there is persistence, it is usually impossible to say anything…
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…
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…
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…
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 study the evolution of asexual microorganisms with small mutation rate in fluctuating environments, and develop techniques that allow us to expand the formal solution of the evolution equations to first order in the mutation rate. Our…
Phenotype-switching with and without sensing environment is a ubiquitous strategy of organisms to survive in fluctuating environment. Fitness of a population of organisms with phenotype-switching may be constrained and restricted by hidden…
Many mathematical models of evolution assume that all individuals experience the same environment. Here, we study the Moran process in heterogeneous environments. The population is of finite size with two competing types, which are exposed…
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…
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…
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…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
Due to stochastic fluctuations arising from finite population size, known as genetic drift, the ability of a population to explore a rugged fitness landscape depends on its size. In the weak mutation regime, while the mean steady-state…