Related papers: Limits on the Evolutionary Rates of Biological Tra…
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…
In ecology and population dynamics, gene-flow refers to the transfer of a trait from one population to another. This phenomenon appears in studying the evolution of social features, such as languages. From the mathematical point of view,…
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.…
By exploiting an analogy between population genetics and statistical mechanics, we study the evolution of a polygenic trait under stabilizing selection, mutation, and genetic drift. This requires us to track only four macroscopic variables,…
We introduce a model to study the impact of catastrophes on evolutionary paths. If we do not allow catastrophes the number of changes in the maximum fitness of a population grows logarithmically with respect to time. Allowing catastrophes…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
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…
Molecular traits, such as gene expression levels or protein binding affinities, are increasingly accessible to quantitative measurement by modern high-throughput techniques. Such traits measure molecular functions and, from an evolutionary…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
We are interested in modeling Darwinian evolution resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. The population is modeled as a stochastic point process whose generator captures…
Fluctuation dynamics of an experimentally measured observable offer a primary signal for nonequilibrium systems, along with dynamics of the mean. While universal speed limits for the mean have actively been studied recently, constraints for…
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…
A macroscopic theory for describing cellular states during steady-growth is presented, which is based on the consistency between cellular growth and molecular replication, as well as the robustness of phenotypes against perturbations.…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of a finite population of RNA sequences adapting to a neutral fitness landscape. Despite the lack of differential fitness between viable sequences, we observe typical properties of adaptive…
We investigate a simple quantitative genetics model subjet to a gradual environmental change from the viewpoint of the phylogenies of the living individuals. We aim to understand better how the past traits of their ancestors are shaped by…
Natural selection is general and powerful concept not only to explain evolutionary processes of biological organisms but also to design engineering systems such as genetic algorithms and particle filters. There is a surge of interest, both…
Although many phenotypic traits are determined by a large number of genetic variants, how a polygenic trait adapts in response to the changes in the environment is still poorly understood. Here we study the adaptation dynamics of a…
We consider the question of the stability of evolutionary algorithms to gradual changes, or drift, in the target concept. We define an algorithm to be resistant to drift if, for some inverse polynomial drift rate in the target function, it…
Understanding how stochastic and non-linear deterministic processes interact is a major challenge in population dynamics theory. After a short review, we introduce a stochastic individual-centered particle model to describe the evolution in…