Related papers: Accessibility percolation in random fitness landsc…
Darwinian evolution is driven by random mutations, genetic recombination (gene shuffling) and selection that favors genotypes with high fitness. For systems where each genotype can be represented as a bitstring of length $L$, an overview of…
Darwinian evolution can be illustrated as an uphill walk in a landscape, where the surface consists of genotypes, the height coordinates represent fitness, and each step corresponds to a point mutation. Epistasis, roughly defined as the…
Epistasis occurs when the effect of a mutation depends on its carrier's genetic background. Despite increasing evidence that epistasis for fitness is common, its role during evolution is contentious. Fitness landscapes, mappings of genotype…
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…
In evolution theory the concept of a fitness landscape has played an important role, evolution itself being portrayed as a hill-climbing process on a rugged landscape. In this article it is shown that in general, in the presence of other…
Fitness landscapes have historically been a powerful tool for analyzing the search space explored by evolutionary algorithms. In particular, they facilitate understanding how easily reachable an optimal solution is from a given starting…
Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…
The genotype-fitness map plays a fundamental role in shaping the dynamics of evolution. However, it is difficult to directly measure a fitness landscape in practice, because the number of possible genotypes is astronomical. One approach is…
The concept of fitness is introduced, and a simple derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (which states that the average fitness of a population increases if its variance is nonzero) is given. After a short discussion of…
Epistatic interactions between mutations add substantial complexity to adaptive landscapes, and are often thought of as detrimental to our ability to predict evolution. Yet, patterns of global epistasis, in which the fitness effect of a…
This is an introductory review of deterministic mutation-selection models for asexual populations (i.e., quasispecies theory) and related topics. First, the basic concepts of fitness, mutations, and sequence space are introduced. Different…
We consider evolution of a large population, where fitness of each organism is defined by many phenotypical traits. These traits result from expression of many genes. We propose a new model of gene regulation, where gene expression is…
Fitness landscapes are genotype to fitness mappings commonly used in evolutionary biology and computer science which are closely related to spin glass models. In this paper, we study the NK model for fitness landscapes where the interaction…
We study adaptation of a haploid asexual population on a fitness landscape defined over binary genotype sequences of length $L$. We consider greedy adaptive walks in which the population moves to the fittest among all single mutant…
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…
A fitness landscape is a genetic space -- with two genotypes adjacent if they differ in a single locus -- and a fitness function. Evolutionary dynamics produce a flow on this landscape from lower fitness to higher; reaching equilibrium only…
The fitness landscape metaphor plays a central role on the modeling of optimizing principles in many research fields, ranging from evolutionary biology, where it was first introduced, to management research. Here we consider the ensemble of…
Proteins evolve through complex sequence spaces, with fitness landscapes serving as a conceptual framework that links sequence to function. Fitness landscapes can be smooth, where multiple similarly accessible evolutionary paths are…
We study biological evolution in a high-dimensional genotype space in the regime of rare mutations and strong selection. The population performs an uphill walk which terminates at local fitness maxima. Assigning fitness randomly to…
Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…