Related papers: Understanding bias in the introduction of variatio…
Biases in molecular evolution can significantly influence evolutionary trajectories. They have been described in a variety of contexts such as development and mutation, but not for acquiring new functions (i.e. emergence). Here, we…
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…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
The contribution to an organism's phenotype from one genetic locus may depend upon the status of other loci. Such epistatic interactions among loci are now recognized as fundamental to shaping the process of adaptation in evolving…
A major goal of molecular evolutionary biology is to identify loci or regions of the genome under selection versus those evolving in a neutral manner. Correct identification allows accurate inference of the evolutionary process and thus…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
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…
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…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…
The problem of the rate and mechanisms of biological evolution was considered. It was shown that species could not be formed due to undirected mutations in characteristic times of about one million years. A mechanism of deterministic…
The interconnected processes of protein folding, mutations, epistasis, and evolution have all been the subject of extensive analysis throughout the years due to their significance for structural and evolutionary biology. The origin…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
There is an intrinsic relationship between the molecular evolution in primordial period and the properties of genomes and proteomes of contemporary species. The genomic data may help us understand the driving force of evolution of life at…
Evolution by natural selection can be seen an algorithm for generating creative solutions to difficult problems. More precisely, evolution by natural selection is a class of algorithms that share a set of properties. The question we address…
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,…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
The current theory of evolution is almost the one Darwin and Wallace proposed two centuries ago and the following discoveries e.g., Mendelian genetics and neutral mutation theory have not made significant modifications. The current…
The purpose of this roadmap article is to draw attention to a paradigm shift in our understanding of evolution towards a perspective of ecological-evolutionary feedback, highlighted through two recent highly simplified examples of rapid…
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.…
In evolutionary dynamics, a key measure of a mutant trait's success is the probability that it takes over the population given some initial mutant-appearance distribution. This "fixation probability" is difficult to compute in general, as…