Related papers: Natural selection as coarsening
Here we postulate three laws which form a mathematical framework to capture the essence of Darwinian evolutionary dynamics. The second law is most quantitative and is explicitly expressed by a unique form of stochastic differential…
The equations of evolutionary change by natural selection are commonly expressed in statistical terms. Fisher's fundamental theorem emphasizes the variance in fitness. Quantitative genetics expresses selection with covariances and…
In the present article the recent works to formulate laws in Darwinian evolutionary dynamics are discussed. Although there is a strong consensus that general laws in biology may exist, opinions opposing such suggestion are abundant. Based…
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…
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,…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
We study the Fisher model describing natural selection in a population with a diploid structure of a genome by differential- geometric methods. For the selection dynamics we introduce an affine connection which is shown to be the…
Two giants of evolutionary theory, Sewall Wright and R. A. Fisher, fought bitterly for over thirty years. The Wright-Fisher controversy forms a cornerstone of the history and philosophy of biology. I argue that the standard interpretations…
Evolutionary biology shares many concepts with statistical physics: both deal with populations, whether of molecules or organisms, and both seek to simplify evolution in very many dimensions. Often, methodologies have undergone parallel and…
Cumulants and moments are closely related to the basic mathematics of continuous and discrete selection (respectively). These relationships generalize Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection and also make clear some of its…
This paper focuses on the maximum speed at which biological evolution can occur. I derive inequalities that limit the rate of evolutionary processes driven by natural selection, mutations, or genetic drift. These \emph{rate limits} link the…
We investigate the profound relation between the equations of biological evolution and quantum mechanics by writing a biologically inspired equation for the stochastic dynamics of an ensemble of particles. Interesting behavior is observed…
Evolution is a dynamic process. The two classical forces of evolution are mutation and selection. Assuming small mutation rates, evolution can be predicted based solely on the fitness differences between phenotypes. Predicting an…
Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…
Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection states that the rate of change in a population's mean fitness equals its additive genetic variance in fitness. This implies that mean fitness should not decline in a constant environment,…
I develop a framework for interpreting the forces that act on any population described by frequencies. The conservation of total frequency, or total probability, shapes the characteristics of force. I begin with Fisher's fundamental theorem…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
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…