Related papers: On Sexual Selection
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
The vast majority of multi-cellular organisms are anisogamous, meaning that male and female sex cells differ in size. It remains an open question how this asymmetric state evolved, presumably from the symmetric isogamous state where all…
When a population inhabits an inhomogeneous environment, the fitness value of traits can vary with the position in the environment. Gene flow caused by random mating can nevertheless prevent that a sexually reproducing population splits…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
On average men are taller and more muscular than women, which confers on them advantages related to female choice and during physical competition with other men. Sexual size dimorphisms such as these come with vulnerabilities due to higher…
One of the most challenging issues of evolutionary biology concerns speciation, the emergence of new species from an initial one. The huge amount of species found in nature demands a simple and robust mechanism. Yet, no consensus has been…
Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…
This paper demonstrates that simple yet important characteristics of coevolution can occur in evolutionary algorithms when only a few conditions are met. We find that interaction-based fitness measurements such as fitness (linear) ranking…
In sexual populations, selection operates neither on the whole genome, which is repeatedly taken apart and reassembled by recombination, nor on individual alleles that are tightly linked to the chromosomal neighborhood. The resulting…
Clonal interference, competition between multiple co-occurring beneficial mutations, has a major role in adaptation of asexual populations. We provide a simple individual based stochastic model of clonal interference taking into account a…
This paper uses a recent explanation for the fundamental haploid-diploid lifecycle of eukaryotic organisms to present a new memetic algorithm that differs from all previous known work using diploid representations. A form of the Baldwin…
This paper develops a simplified set of models describing asexual and sexual replication in unicel- lular diploid organisms. The models assume organisms whose genomes consist of two chromosomes, where each chromosome is assumed to be…
The factors that influence genetic architecture shape the structure of the fitness landscape, and therefore play a large role in the evolutionary dynamics. Here the NK model is used to investigate how epistasis and pleiotropy -- key…
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…
Species do not merely evolve, they also coevolve with other organisms. Coevolution is a major force driving interacting species to continuously evolve ex- ploring their fitness landscapes. Coevolution involves the coupling of species fit-…
Sexual reproduction is not always synonymous with the existence of two morphologically different sexes; isogamous species produce sex cells of equal size, typically falling into multiple distinct self-incompatible classes, termed mating…
In evolutionary algorithms, the fitness of a population increases with time by mutating and recombining individuals and by a biased selection of more fit individuals. The right selection pressure is critical in ensuring sufficient…
Identifying and quantifying the benefits of sex and recombination is a long standing problem in evolutionary theory. In particular, contradictory claims have been made about the existence of a benefit of recombination on high dimensional…
Sex in higher diploids carries a two-fold cost of males that should reduce its fitness relative to cloning and result in its extinction. Instead, sex is widespread and it is clonal species that face early obsolescence. One possible reason…
The benefit of sexual recombination is one of the most fundamental questions both in population genetics and evolutionary computation. It is widely believed that recombination helps solving difficult optimization problems. We present the…