Related papers: Unpredictable repeatability in molecular evolution
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Stochastic models of sequential mutation acquisition are widely used to quantify cancer and bacterial evolution. Across manifold scenarios, recurrent research questions are: how many cells are there with $n$ alterations, and how long will…
The outcomes of evolution are determined by which mutations occur and fix. In rapidly adapting microbial populations, this process is particularly hard to predict because lineages with different beneficial mutations often spread…
Proliferating cell populations at steady state growth often exhibit broad protein distributions with exponential tails. The sources of this variation and its universality are of much theoretical interest. Here we address the problem by…
Epistasis refers to the phenomenon in which phenotypic consequences caused by mutation of one gene depend on one or more mutations at another gene. Epistasis is critical for understanding many genetic and evolutionary processes, including…
The total number of fatalities of an epidemic outbreak is a dramatic but extremely informative quantity. Knowledge of the statistics of this quantity allows the calculation of the mean total number of fatalities conditioned to the fact that…
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…
Natural selection has produced an extraordinary diversity of life histories spanning many orders of magnitude in body size, vital rates, and biological times. In general, big and cold organisms grow and reproduce slowly and live long lives;…
We study the population genetics of Evolution in the important special case of weak selection, in which all fitness values are assumed to be close to one another. We show that in this regime natural selection is tantamount to the…
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…
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally similar…
The emergence of a predominant phenotype within a cell population is often triggered by a rare accumulation of DNA mutations in a single cell. For example, tumors may be initiated by a single cell in which multiple mutations cooperate to…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
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…
We present two adaptive schemes for dynamically choosing the number of parallel instances in parallel evolutionary algorithms. This includes the choice of the offspring population size in a (1+$\lambda$) EA as a special case. Our schemes…
We study a class of evolution models, where the breeding process involves an arbitrary exchangeable process, allowing for mutations to appear. The population size $n$ is fixed, hence after breeding, selection is applied. Individuals are…
The distribution of species body size within taxonomic groups exhibits a heavy right-tail extending over many orders of magnitude, where most species are significantly larger than the smallest species. We provide a simple model of…
The task for a general and useful classification of the tail behaviors of probability distributions still has no satisfactory solution. Due to lack of information outside the range of the data the tails of the distribution should be…
In reliability and life data analysis, the Weibull distribution is widely used to accommodate more data characteristics by changing the values of the parameters. We frequently observe many zeros or close to zero data points in reliability…
Large-scale multiple testing with correlated and heavy-tailed data arises in a wide range of research areas from genomics, medical imaging to finance. Conventional methods for estimating the false discovery proportion (FDP) often ignore the…