Related papers: Evolving generalists via dynamic sculpting of rugg…
The concept of a fitness landscape is a powerful metaphor that offers insight into various aspects of evolutionary processes and guidance for the study of evolution. Until recently, empirical evidence on the ruggedness of these landscapes…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
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…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
A model for the evolution of a finite population in a rugged fitness landscape is introduced and solved. The population is trapped in an evolutionary loop, alternating periods of stasis to periods in which it performs adaptive walks. The…
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…
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…
Cumulative cultural evolution is what made humanity to thrive in various ecological and demographic environments. Solutions to the tasks that humans needed to solve could be mapped onto a task space which could take the form of either…
Early theoretical work revealed that the simplest class of autocatalytic cycles, known as hypercycles, provide an elegant framework for understanding the evolution of mutualism. Furthermore, hypercycles are highly susceptible to parasites,…
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…
We analytically study the dynamics of evolving populations that exhibit metastability on the level of phenotype or fitness. In constant selective environments, such metastable behavior is caused by two qualitatively different mechanisms.…
Adaptation to changing environments is a hallmark of biological systems. Diversity in traits is necessary for adaptation and can influence the survival of a population faced with novelty. In habitats that remain stable over many…
A common assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing evolution of complexity appear more nuanced. Evolution is deeply connected to learning, where…
The existence of complex (multiple-step) genetic adaptations that are "irreducible" (i.e., all partial combinations are less fit than the original genotype) is one of the longest standing problems in evolutionary biology. In standard…
The fitness landscape defines the relationship between genotypes and fitness in a given environment, and underlies fundamental quantities such as the distribution of selection coefficient, or the magnitude and type of epistasis. A better…
How adaptive evolution to one environmental stress improves or suppresses adaptation to another is an important problem in evolutionary biology. For instance, in microbiology, the evolution of bacteria to be resistant to different…
In this work we have investigated the evolutionary dynamics of a generalist pathogen, e.g. a virus population, that evolves towards specialisation in an environment with multiple host types. We have particularly explored under which…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
A simplified form of the time dependent evolutionary dynamics of a quasispecies model with a rugged fitness landscape is solved via a mapping onto a random flux model whose asymptotic behavior can be described in terms of a random walk. The…