Related papers: Limits on the Evolutionary Rates of Biological Tra…
Recent microbial experiments suggest that enhanced genetic drift at the frontier of a two-dimensional range expansion can cause genetic sectoring patterns with fractal domain boundaries. Here, we propose and analyze a simple model of…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection states that the rate of change in a population's mean fitness equals its additive genetic variance in fitness. This implies that mean fitness should not decline in a constant environment,…
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…
Some species exhibit very high levels of DNA sequence variability; there is also evidence for the existence of heritable epigenetic variants that experience state changes at a much higher rate than sequence variants. In both cases, the…
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 evolutionary trajectories traced out by an infinite population undergoing mutation-selection dynamics in static, uncorrelated random fitness landscapes. Starting from the population that consists of a single genotype, the…
The evolution of dispersal is a classical question in evolutionary ecology, which has been widely studied with several mathematical models. The main question is to define the fittest dispersal rate for a population in a bounded domain, and,…
Horizontal gene transfer consists in exchanging genetic materials between microorganisms during their lives. This is a major mechanism of bacterial evolution and is believed to be of main importance in antibiotics resistance. We consider a…
We are interested in modelling Darwinian evolution, resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. Our models are rooted in the microscopic, stochastic description of a population…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
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…
Evolutionary branching is analysed in a stochastic, individual-based population model under mutation and selection. In such models, the common assumption is that individual reproduction and life career are characterised by values of a…
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,…
Darwinian evolution can be modeled in general terms as a flow in the space of fitness (i.e. reproductive rate) distributions. In the diffusion approximation, Tsimring et al. have showed that this flow admits "fitness wave" solutions:…
The interrelationships of the fundamental biological processes natural selection, mutation, and stochastic drift are quantified by the entropy rate of Moran processes with mutation, measuring the long-run variation of a Markov process. The…
We show how concepts from statistical physics, such as order parameter, thermodynamic limit, and quantum phase transition, translate into biological concepts in mutation-selection models for sequence evolution and can be used there. The…
In genetic drift of small population, it is well known that even when the ratio of alleles is 0.5, specific genes are fixed in or disappear from the population. It seems the reason why inbreeding is avoided. On the other hand, this…
Natural selection and random drift are competing phenomena for explaining the evolution of populations. Combining a highly fit mutant with a population structure that improves the odds that the mutant spreads through the whole population…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…