Related papers: On the feasibility of saltational evolution
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…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
In the past years, a remarkable mapping has been found between the dynamics of a population of M individuals undergoing random mutations and selection, and that of a single system in contact with a thermal bath with temperature 1/M. This…
It is likely that the strength of selection acting upon a mutation varies through time due to changes in the environment. However, most population genetic theory assumes that the strength of selection remains constant. Here we investigate…
In epistatic fitness landscapes, the fitness effect of a mutation depends on the genetic background and may even switch between deleterious and beneficial depending on the presence of another mutation. Epistatic interactions may cause both…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
Background: Acceleration of adaptation dynamics by stress-induced hypermutation has been found experimentally. Evolved evolvability is a prominent explanation. We investigate a more generally applicable explanation by a physical constraint.…
The biological theory of adaptive dynamics proposes a description of the long-term evolution of a structured asexual population. It is based on the assumptions of large population, rare mutations and small mutation steps, that lead to a…
The adaptation rate in theoretical models of biological evolution increases with the mutation rate but only to a point when mutations into lethal states cause extinction. One would expect that removing such states should be beneficial for…
We discuss stochastic dynamics of populations of individuals playing games. Our models possess two evolutionarily stable strategies: an efficient one, where a population is in a state with the maximal payoff (fitness) and a risk-dominant…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
Adaptive dynamics so far has been put on a rigorous footing only for clonal inheritance. We extend this to sexually reproducing diploids, although admittedly still under the restriction of an unstructured population with Lotka-Volterra-like…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
Evolutionary multitasking has recently emerged as a novel paradigm that enables the similarities and/or latent complementarities (if present) between distinct optimization tasks to be exploited in an autonomous manner simply by solving them…
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…
Genetic interactions can strongly influence the fitness effects of individual mutations, yet the impact of these epistatic interactions on evolutionary dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the evolutionary role of…
How fast does a population evolve from one fitness peak to another? We study the dynamics of evolving, asexually reproducing populations in which a certain number of mutations jointly confer a fitness advantage. We consider the time until a…
We study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…