Related papers: Direction and Constraint in Phenotypic Evolution: …
Most theories of evolutionary diversification are based on equilibrium assumptions: they are either based on optimality arguments involving static fitness landscapes, or they assume that populations first evolve to an equilibrium state…
The central goal of a dynamical theory of evolution is to abstract the mean evolutionary trajectory in the trait space by considering ecological processes at the level of the individual. In this work, we develop such a theory for a new…
Cellular phenotype is characterized by different components such as cell size, protein content and cell cycle time. These are global variables that are the outcome of multiple internal microscopic processes. Accordingly, they display some…
An increasing number of dissident voices claim that the standard neo-Darwinian view of genes as 'leaders' and phenotypes as 'followers' during the process of adaptive evolution should be turned on its head. This idea is older than the…
The mutual influence of dynamics and structure is a central issue in complex systems. In this paper we study by simulation slow evolution of network under the feedback of a local-majority-rule opinion process. If performance-enhancing local…
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…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
During bouts of evolutionary diversification, such as adaptive radiations, the emerging species cluster around different locations in phenotype space, How such multimodal patterns in phenotype space can emerge from a single ancestral…
The exploration of vast genotype spaces poses fundamental challenges for evolving populations. As the number of genotypes encoding viable phenotypes grows exponentially with genome length, populations can only explore a tiny fraction of…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…
We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…
Environmental variations can significantly influence how populations compete for resources, and hence shape their evolution. Here, we study population dynamics subject to a fluctuating environment modeled by a varying carrying capacity…
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…
Evolutionary analyses of large populations commonly incorporate stochasticity through temporal variation in selection while treating genetic transmission as fixed. Much less attention has been given to stochasticity in transmission itself.…
We study the dynamics of a population subject to selective pressures, evolving either on RNA neutral networks or in toy fitness landscapes. We discuss the spread and the neutrality of the population in the steady state. Different limits…
Phenotypic fluctuations and plasticity can generally affect the course of evolution, a process known as the Baldwin effect. Several studies have recast this effect and claimed that phenotypic plasticity acceler- ates evolutionary rate (the…
The relationship between sequences and secondary structures or shapes in RNA exhibits robust statistical properties summarized by three notions: (1) the notion of a typical shape (that among all sequences of fixed length certain shapes are…
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…