Related papers: Limiting fitness distributions in evolutionary dyn…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the…
In the past years, a remarkable mapping has been found between the dynamics of a population of M individuals undergoing random mutations and selection, and that of a single system in contact with a thermal bath with temperature 1/M. This…
We study biological evolution in a high-dimensional genotype space in the regime of rare mutations and strong selection. The population performs an uphill walk which terminates at local fitness maxima. Assigning fitness randomly to…
We study the evolution of sexual and asexual populations in general fitness landscapes. We find deep relations between the mathematics of biological evolution and the formalism of quantum mechanics. We give the general structure of the…
Spatially resolved genetic data is increasingly used to reconstruct the migrational history of species. To assist such inference, we study, by means of simulations and analytical methods, the dynamics of neutral gene frequencies in a…
We consider a general class of Markovian models describing the growth in a randomly fluctuating environment of a clonal biological population having several phenotypes related by stochastic switching. Phenotypes differ e.g. by the level of…
We consider a mutation-selection model of a population structured by the spatial variables and a trait variable which is the diffusion rate. Competition for resource is local in spatial variables, but nonlocal in the trait variable. We…
We study the long time behavior of an asymmetric size-structured measure-valued growth-fragmentation branching process that models the dynamics of a population of cells taking into account physiological and morphological asymmetry at…
We consider the problem of determining the time evolution of a trait distribution in a mathematical model of non-uniform populations with parametric heterogeneity. This means that we consider only heterogeneous populations in which…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
A simplified form of the time dependent evolutionary dynamics of a quasispecies model with a rugged fitness landscape is solved via a mapping onto a random flux model whose asymptotic behavior can be described in terms of a random walk. The…
This paper introduces a variational formulation of natural selection, paying special attention to the nature of "things" and the way that different "kinds" of "things" are individuated from - and influence - each other. We use the Bayesian…
In biology, information flows from the environment to the genome by the process of natural selection. But it has not been clear precisely what sort of information metric properly describes natural selection. Here, I show that Fisher…
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 consider a system of two competing populations in two-dimensional heterogeneous environments. The populations are assumed to move horizontally and vertically with different probabilities, but are otherwise identical. We regard these…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
Fitness consequence of dispersal depends on property of the entire landscape, which patches are available and what are the cost of moving. These are information that are not available locally when an organism make the decision to disperse.…
Phenotypic fluctuations and plasticity can generally affect the course of evolution, a process known as the Baldwin effect. Several studies have recast this effect and claimed that phenotypic plasticity acceler- ates evolutionary rate (the…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…