Related papers: Darwinian Genetic Drift
When a biological population expands into new territory, genetic drift develops an enormous influence on evolution at the propagating front. In such range expansion processes, fluctuations in allele frequencies occur through stochastic…
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,…
Clonal interference, competition between multiple co-occurring beneficial mutations, has a major role in adaptation of asexual populations. We provide a simple individual based stochastic model of clonal interference taking into account a…
Understanding the population structure and patterns of gene flow within species is of fundamental importance to the study of evolution. In the fields of population and evolutionary genetics, measures of genetic differentiation are commonly…
A formalism for describing the dynamics of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) using methods from statistical mechanics is applied to the problem of generalization in a perceptron with binary weights. The dynamics are solved for the case where a new…
In evolutionary games the fitness of individuals is not constant but depends on the relative abundance of the various strategies in the population. Here we study general games among n strategies in populations of large but finite size. We…
Biologists have long sought a way to explain how statistical properties of genetic sequences emerged and are maintained through evolution. On the one hand, non-random structures at different scales indicate a complex genome organisation. On…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
Evolutionary game dynamics in finite populations is typically subject to noise, inducing effects which are not present in deterministic systems, including fixation and extinction. In the first part of this paper we investigate the…
Dispersal of species to find a more favorable habitat is important in population dynamics. Dispersal rates evolve in response to the relative success of different dispersal strategies. In a simplified deterministic treatment (J. Dockery, V.…
We discuss the population dynamics with selection and random diffusion, keeping the total population constant, in a fitness landscape associated with Constraint Satisfaction, a paradigm for difficult optimization problems. We obtain a phase…
The observation that phenotypic variability is ubiquitous in isogenic populations has led to a multitude of experimental and theoretical studies seeking to probe the causes and consequences of this variability. Whether it be in the context…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
Positive selection distorts the structure of genealogies and hence alters patterns of genetic variation within a population. Most analyses of these distortions focus on the signatures of hitchhiking due to hard or soft selective sweeps at a…
Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…
We study the dynamics of a population subject to selective pressures, evolving either on RNA neutral networks or in toy fitness landscapes. We discuss the spread and the neutrality of the population in the steady state. Different limits…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
Empirical evidence is presented which contradicts the established interpretation of the intraspecific genetic variability as the adaptive potential of the species: the uniform evolutionary tempo across the life kingdom, species…
We study an ecology-inspired model for a population of bounded size, whose dynamics is governed by random birth, death, and immigration events. Stochastic fluctuations in the number of individuals give rise to a succession of alternating…
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…