Related papers: Lewontin (1972)
In 1995 I wrote a paper: "A Speed Limit for Evolution" whose main result was that evolution must proceed rather slowly, in accordance with the earlier views and intuitions of many authors. The abstract of the paper said: "The genetic…
Selection bias is a common concern in epidemiologic studies. In the literature, selection bias is often viewed as a missing data problem. Popular approaches to adjust for bias due to missing data, such as inverse probability weighting, rely…
Population diversity is crucial in evolutionary algorithms as it helps with global exploration and facilitates the use of crossover. Despite many runtime analyses showing advantages of population diversity, we have no clear picture of how…
An ongoing debate in evolutionary biology is whether phenotypic change occurs predominantly around the time of speciation or whether it instead accumulates gradually over time. In this work I propose a general framework incorporating both…
This paper shows that differentiating the lifetimes of two phenotypes independently from their fertility can lead to a qualitative change in the equilibrium of a population: since survival and reproduction are distinct functional aspects of…
We conducted an investigation of the effect that extreme variability of the individual's environment has in the individual's adaptability and, in general, in the co-evolution of a population. First we assume that the individuals are a kind…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
We introduce the following model for the evolution of a population. At every discrete time $j\geq 0$ exactly one individual is introduced in the population and is assigned a death probability $c_j$ sampled from $C$, a fixed probability…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
Recombination is a fundamental evolutionary force, but it is difficult to quantify because the effect of a recombination event on patterns of variation in a sample of genetic data can be hard to discern. Estimators for the recombination…
In this work, we characterize the solution of a system of elliptic integro-differential equations describing a phenotypically structured population subject to mutation, selection and migration between two habitats. Assuming that the effects…
This paper introduces a variational formulation of natural selection, paying special attention to the nature of "things" and the way that different "kinds" of "things" are individuated from - and influence - each other. We use the Bayesian…
In their well-known textbook (Vincent & Brown, 2005), Vincent and Brown suggested an attractive approach for studying evolutionary dynamics of populations that are heterogeneous with respect to some strategy that affects the fitness of…
Biological systems like long-lived clonal organisms, holobionts and clades challenge traditional evolutionary thinking since they adapt without populations or reproduction. This paper aims to provide an overarching theoretical framework…
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the…
The coalescent revolutionised theoretical population genetics, simplifying, or making possible for the first time, many analyses, proofs, and derivations, and offering crucial insights about the way in which the structure of data in samples…
The equations of evolutionary change by natural selection are commonly expressed in statistical terms. Fisher's fundamental theorem emphasizes the variance in fitness. Quantitative genetics expresses selection with covariances and…
We consider the dynamics imposed by natural selection on the populations of two competing, sexually reproducing, haploid species. In this setting, the fitness of any genome varies over time due to the changing population mix of the…
Reconstruction of population histories is a central problem in population genetics. Existing coalescent-based methods, like the seminal work of Li and Durbin (Nature, 2011), attempt to solve this problem using sequence data but have no…
It is generally accepted that "diversity" is associated with success in evolutionary algorithms. However, diversity is a broad concept that can be measured and defined in a multitude of ways. To date, most evolutionary computation research…