Related papers: Natural selection in compartmentalized environment…

Plant breeding and variety trials are usually conducted in multiple environments sampled from a defined target population of environments in order to characterize the performance of breeding lines or varieties. When the population is large…

Maintaining genetic diversity as a means to avoid premature convergence is critical in Genetic Programming. Several approaches have been proposed to achieve this, with some focusing on the mating phase from coupling dissimilar solutions to…

Mounting evidence suggests that natural populations can harbor extensive fitness diversity with numerous genomic loci under selection. It is also known that genealogical trees for populations under selection are quantifiably different from…

The mutation-selection mechanism of Darwinian evolution gives rise not only to adaptation to environmental conditions but also to the enhancement of robustness against mutations. When two or more phenotypes have the same fitness value, the…

1. Predicting space use patterns of animals from their interactions with the environment is fundamental for understanding the effect of habitat changes on ecosystem functioning. Recent attempts to address this problem have sought to unify…

We propose a mathematical framework for natural selection in finite populations. Traditionally, many of the selection-based processes used to describe cultural and genetic evolution (such as imitation and birth-death models) have been…

Motivated by applications in neuroanatomy, we propose a novel methodology for estimating the heritability which corresponds to the proportion of phenotypic variance which can be explained by genetic factors. Estimating this quantity for…

The mechanisms by which adaptive phenotypes spread within an evolving population after their emergence are understood fairly well. Much less is known about the factors that influence the evolutionary accessibility of such phenotypes, a…

Phenotypic evolution implies sequential fixations of new genomic sequences. The speed at which these mutations fixate depends, in part, on the relative fitness (selection coefficient) of the mutant vs. the ancestor. Using a simple…

Stronger selection implies faster evolution---that is, the greater the force, the faster the change. This apparently self-evident proposition, however, is derived under the assumption that genetic variation within a population is primarily…

A hybrid evolutionary algorithm with importance sampling method is proposed for multi-dimensional optimization problems in this paper. In order to make use of the information provided in the search process, a set of visited solutions is…

Random copying is a simple model for population dynamics in the absence of selection, and has been applied to both biological and cultural evolution. In this work, we investigate the effect that spatial structure has on the dynamics. We…

A microscopic model is developed, within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits, to study both numerically and analytically the combined effect of competition and assortativity on the sympatric speciation process, i.e. speciation in…

The quest to understand structure-function relationships in networks across scientific disciplines has intensified. However, the optimal network architecture remains elusive, particularly for complex information processing. Therefore, we…

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.…

Intragenomic recombination (crossover) is a very important evolutionary mechanism. The crossover events are not evenly distributed along the natural chromosomes. Monte Carlo simulations revealed that frequency of recombinations decides…

We consider an asexual population under strong selection-weak mutation conditions evolving on rugged fitness landscapes with many local fitness peaks. Unlike the previous studies in which the initial fitness of the population is assumed to…

Speciation is of fundamental importance to understanding the huge diversity of life on Earth. In contrast to current phenomenological models, we develop a biophysically motivated approach to study speciation involving the co-evolution of…

Generative molecular optimization aims to design molecules with properties surpassing those of existing compounds. However, such candidates are rare and expensive to evaluate, yielding sample efficiency essential. Additionally, surrogate…

Our models for detecting the effect of adaptation on population genomic diversity are often predicated on a single newly arisen mutation sweeping rapidly to fixation. However, a population can also adapt to a new situation by multiple…