Related papers: The Evolution of Sex through the Baldwin Effect
We compare the speed with which a sexual, respectively an asexual, population is able to respond to a biased selective pressure. Our model focuses on the Weismann hypothesis that the extra variation caused by crossing-over and recombination…
Using a bit string model, we show that asexual reproduction for diploids is more efficient than for haploids: it improves genetic material producing new individuals with less deleterious mutations. We also see that in a system where…
Using a lattice model based on Monte Carlo simulations, we study the role of the reproduction pattern on the fate of an evolving population. Each individual is under the selection pressure from the environment and random mutations. The…
We propose a simple model for genetic adaptation to a changing environment, describing a fitness landscape characterized by two maxima. One is associated with "specialist" individuals that are adapted to the environment; this maximum moves…
Maintenance of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination imposes physiological costs when compared to parthenogenic reproduction, most prominently: for maintaining the corresponding (molecular) machinery, for finding a mating partner,…
Homologous recombination is an important operator in the evolution of biological organisms. However, there is still no clear, generally accepted understanding of why it exists and under what circumstances it is useful. In this paper we…
Evolution depends on the possibility of successfully exploring fitness landscapes via mutation and recombination. With these search procedures, exploration is difficult in "rugged" fitness landscapes, where small mutations can drastically…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…
The idea of adaptive walks on fitness landscapes as a means of studying evolutionary processes on large time scales is extended to fitness landscapes that are slowly changing over time. The influence of ruggedness and of the amount of…
The benefit of sexual recombination is one of the most fundamental questions both in population genetics and evolutionary computation. It is widely believed that recombination helps solving difficult optimization problems. We present the…
We investigate the distribution of flavonoids, a major category of plant secondary metabolites, across species. Flavonoids are known to show high species specificity, and were once considered as chemical markers for understanding adaptive…
We generalize the standard Penna bit-string model of biological ageing by assuming that each deleterious mutation diminishes the survival probability in every time interval by a small percentage. This effect is added to the usual lethal but…
Cells can often choose among several stably heritable phenotypes. Examples are the expression of genes in eukaryotic cells where long chromosomal regions can adopt persistent and heritable silenced or active states, that may be associated…
Background: Recent experimental and theoretical studies have shown that small asexual populations evolving on complex fitness landscapes may achieve a higher fitness than large ones due to the increased heterogeneity of adaptive…
Evolutionary game theory has traditionally assumed that all individuals in a population interact with each other between reproduction events. We show that eliminating this restriction by explicitly considering the time scales of interaction…
We study the role of recombination, as practiced by genetically-competent bacteria, in speeding up Darwinian evolution. This is done by adding a new process to a previously-studied Markov model of evolution on a smooth fitness landscape;…
The evolutionary effect of recombination depends crucially on the epistatic interactions between linked loci. A paradigmatic case where recombination is known to be strongly disadvantageous is a two-locus fitness landscape dis- playing…
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…
We consider a recent innovative theory by Chastain et al. on the role of sex in evolution [PNAS'14]. In short, the theory suggests that the evolutionary process of gene recombination implements the celebrated multiplicative weights updates…