Related papers: Natural selection of mutants that modify populatio…
Whether or not cooperation is favored in evolutionary games on graphs depends on the population structure and spatial properties of the interaction network. Population structures can be expressed as configurations. Such configurations…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
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…
In human societies the probability of strategy adoption from a given person may be affected by the personal features. Now we investigate how an artificially imposed restricted ability to reproduce, overruling ones fitness, affects an…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
We investigate the dynamics of the voter model in which the population itself changes endogenously via the birth-death process. There are two species of voters, labeled A and B, and the population of each species can grow or shrink by the…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
We investigate the exploration of rugged fitness landscapes by spatially structured populations with demes on the nodes of a graph, connected by migrations. In the rare migration regime, we find that finite structures can adapt more…
The environment has a strong influence on a population's evolutionary dynamics. Driven by both intrinsic and external factors, the environment is subject to continual change in nature. To capture an ever-changing environment, we consider a…
Mutations are typically classified by their effects on the nucleotide sequence and by their size. Here, we argue that if our main aim is to understand the effect of mutations on evolutionary outcomes (such as adaptation or speciation), we…
Evolutionary dynamics can be studied in well-mixed or structured populations. Population structure typically arises from the heterogeneous distribution of individuals in physical space or on social networks. Here we introduce a new type of…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
Gene duplications are one of major primary driving forces for evolutionary novelty. We took population genetics models of genes duplicate to study how evolutionary forces acting during the fixation of mutant allele at duplicate loci. We…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
Population structure induced by both spatial embedding and more general networks of interaction, such as model social networks, have been shown to have a fundamental effect on the dynamics and outcome of evolutionary games. These effects…
Over time, a population acquires neutral genetic substitutions as a consequence of random drift. A famous result in population genetics asserts that the rate, $K$, at which these substitutions accumulate in the population coincides with the…
The spread in time of a mutation through a population is studied analytically and computationally in fully-connected networks and on spatial lattices. The time, t_*, for a favourable mutation to dominate scales with population size N as…
A new approach to understanding evolution [Val09], namely viewing it through the lens of computation, has already started yielding new insights, e.g., natural selection under sexual reproduction can be interpreted as the Multiplicative…