Related papers: Natural selection of mutants that modify populatio…
The stage of evolution is the population of reproducing individuals. The structure of the population is know to affect the dynamics and outcome of evolutionary processes, but analytical results for generic random structures have been…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
For two genotypes that have the same mean number of offspring but differ in the variance in offspring number, natural selection will favor the genotype with lower variance. The concept of fitness becomes cloudy under these conditions…
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,…
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…
The unwelcome evolution of malignancy during cancer progression emerges through a selection process in a complex heterogeneous population structure. In the present work, we investigate evolutionary dynamics in a phenotypically heterogeneous…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…
We examine the dynamics of an age-structured population model in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of the parent. While the total population of the system always reaches a steady state, the…
Community assembly is studied using individual-based multispecies models. The models have stochastic population dynamics with mutation, migration, and extinction of species. Mutants appear as a result of mutation of the resident species,…
A mutator is an allele that increases the mutation rate throughout the genome by disrupting some aspect of DNA replication or repair. Mutators that increase the mutation rate by the order of 100 fold have been observed to spontaneously…
In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…
We study the competition between several advantageous mutants in an asexual population (clonal interference) as a function of the time between the appearance of the mutants, their selective advantages, and the rate of deleterious mutations.…
Evolutionary graph theory (EGT) studies the effect of population structure on evolutionary dynamics. The vertices of the graph represent the $N$ individuals. The edges denote interactions for competitive replacement. Two standard update…
Large populations may contain numerous simultaneously segregating polymorphisms subject to natural selection. Since selection acts on individuals whose fitness depends on many loci, different loci affect each other's dynamics. This leads to…
Cooperation is a difficult proposition in the face of Darwinian selection. Those that defect have an evolutionary advantage over cooperators who should therefore die out. However, spatial structure enables cooperators to survive through the…
We consider the Moran model of population genetics with two types, mutation, and selection, and investigate the line of descent of a randomly-sampled individual from a contemporary population. We trace this ancestral line back into the…
Existing theoretical models of evolution focus on the relative fitness advantages of different mutants in a population while the dynamic behavior of the population size is mostly left unconsidered. We here present a generic stochastic model…
We present a model for evolving population which maintains genetic polymorphism. By introducing random mutation in the model population at a constant rate, we observe that the population does not become extinct but survives, keeping…
Evolutionary dynamics and patterns of molecular evolution are strongly influenced by selection on linked regions of the genome, but our quantitative understanding of these effects remains incomplete. Recent work has focused on predicting…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…