Related papers: Complementary Theory of Evolutionary Genetics
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
Apparent biodiversity on earth exists only if we compare different species separated from their environments. Meanwhile coexisting species have to be identical in terms of energetic interactions. Consider the biosphere as a network of…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
We have used the Monte Carlo based computer models to show that selection pressure could affect the distribution of recombination hotspots along the chromosome. Close to critical crossover rate, where genomes may switch between the…
Microbiomes are complex systems comprised of many interacting species. Species can survive harsh or changing conditions by rapid adaptation, a process accelerated by the exchange of genetic material between different species through…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
Unraveling the evolutionary forces shaping bacterial diversity can today be tackled using a growing amount of genomic data. While the genome of eukaryotes is highly stable, bacterial genomes from cells of the same species highly vary in…
Competition between random genetic drift and natural selection plays a central role in evolution: Whereas non-beneficial mutations often prevail in small populations by chance, mutations that sweep through large populations typically confer…
Many socio-economic and biological processes can be modeled as systems of interacting individuals. The behaviour of such systems can be often described within game-theoretic models. In these lecture notes, we introduce fundamental concepts…
We consider a recent innovative theory by Chastain et al. on the role of sex in evolution [PNAS'14]. In short, the theory suggests that the evolutionary process of gene recombination implements the celebrated multiplicative weights updates…
When studying the dynamics of trait distribution of populations in a heterogeneous environment, classical models from quantitative genetics choose to look at its system of moments, specifically the first two ones. Additionally, in order to…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
The metaphor of holey adaptive landscapes provides a pictorial representation of the process of speciation as a consequence of genetic divergence. In this metaphor, biological populations diverge along connected clusters of well-fit…
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…
In evolutionary processes, population structure has a substantial effect on natural selection. Here, we analyze how motion of individuals affects constant selection in structured populations. Motion is relevant because it leads to changes…
Transposable elements are DNA sequences that can move around to different positions in the genome. During this process, they can cause mutations, and lead to an increase in genome size. Despite representing a large genomic fraction,…
Neutral speciation mechanisms based on isolation by distance and sexual selection, termed topopatric, have recently been shown to describe the observed patterns of abundance distributions and species-area relationships. Previous works have…
Non-selective effects, like genetic drift, are an important factor in modern conceptions of evolution, and have been extensively studied for constant population sizes. Here, we consider non-selective evolution in the case of growing…