Related papers: Genealogical Distance as a Diversity Estimate in E…

We interpret the Moran model of natural selection and drift as an algorithm for learning features of a simplified fitness landscape, specifically genotype superiority. This algorithm's efficiency in extracting these characteristics is…

Competition between random genetic drift and natural selection plays a central role in evolution: Whereas non-beneficial mutations often prevail in small populations by chance, mutations that sweep through large populations typically confer…

Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…

In this work we explore the dissimilarity between symmetric word pairs, by comparing the inter-word distance distribution of a word to that of its reversed complement. We propose a new measure of dissimilarity between such distributions.…

The primary aim of automated performance improvement is to reduce the running time of programs while maintaining (or improving on) functionality. In this paper, Genetic Programming is used to find performance improvements in regular…

Human populations have a complex history of introgression and of changing population size. Human genetic variation has been affected by both these processes, so that inference of past population size depends upon the pattern of gene flow…

Evolvability is defined as the ability of a population to generate heritable variation to facilitate its adaptation to new environments or selection pressures. In this article, we consider evolvability as a phenotypic trait subject to…

We reconsider the deterministic haploid mutation-selection equation with two types. This is an ordinary differential equation that describes the type distribution (forward in time) in a population of infinite size. This paper establishes…

Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…

Observed differences in mean phenotypic values across human groups have attracted renewed interest with the rise of large-scale genomic studies and polygenic risk prediction. However, the genetic basis of these differences is far more…

Evolutionary algorithms, inspired by natural evolution, aim to optimize difficult objective functions without computing derivatives. Here we detail the relationship between population genetics and evolutionary optimization and formulate a…

Diversity plays a crucial role in evolutionary computation. While diversity has been mainly used to prevent the population of an evolutionary algorithm from premature convergence, the use of evolutionary algorithms to obtain a diverse set…

Dendrograms are a way to represent evolutionary relationships between organisms. Nowadays, these are inferred based on the comparison of genes or protein sequences by taking into account their differences and similarities. The genetic…

When biological populations expand into new territory, the evolutionary outcomes can be strongly influenced by genetic drift, the random fluctuations in allele frequencies. Meanwhile, spatial variability in the environment can also…

Phylogenetic inference-the derivation of a hypothesis for the common evolutionary history of a group of species- is an active area of research at the intersection of biology, computer science, mathematics, and statistics. One assumes the…

Edit distance, also known as Levenshtein distance, is an essential way to compare two strings that proved to be particularly useful in the analysis of genetic sequences and natural language processing. However, edit distance is a discrete…

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…

Diversity indices are useful single-number metrics for characterizing a complex distribution of a set of attributes across a population of interest. The utility of these different metrics or sets of metrics depend on the context and…

There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…

Accurate evaluation of human aesthetic preferences represents a major challenge for creative evolutionary and generative systems research. Prior work has tended to focus on feature measures of the artefact, such as symmetry, complexity and…