Related papers: Adaptation to a changing environment: what me Norm…
Although a number of studies have shown that natural and laboratory populations initially well-adapted to their environment can evolve rapidly when conditions suddenly change, the dynamics of rapid adaptation are not well understood. Here a…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
The evolution and function of imitation have always been placed within the confines of animal learning and associated with its crucial role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution. Can imitation evolve as a form of phenotypic…
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…
This work presents a population genetic model of evolution, which includes haploid selection, mutation, recombination, and drift. The mutation-selection equilibrium can be expressed exactly in closed form for arbitrary fitness functions…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
We consider a trait-structured population subject to mutation, birth and competition of logistic type, where the number of coexisting types may fluctuate. Applying a limit of rare mutations to this population while keeping the population…
Biological aging is characterized by an age-dependent increase in the probability of death and by a decrease in the reproductive capacity. Individual age-dependent rates of survival and reproduction have a strong impact on population…
We consider an asexual population evolving on rugged fitness landscapes which are defined on the multi-dimensional genotypic space and have many local optima. We track the most populated genotype as it changes when the population jumps from…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…
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…
Phenotypic evolution implies sequential fixations of new genomic sequences. The speed at which these mutations fixate depends, in part, on the relative fitness (selection coefficient) of the mutant vs. the ancestor. Using a simple…
We study a continuous time model for the frequency distribution of an infinitely large asexual population in which both beneficial and deleterious mutations occur and the fitness is additive. When beneficial mutations are ignored, the exact…
We consider a stochastic model of population dynamics where each individual is characterised by a trait in {0,1,...,L} and has a natural reproduction rate, a logistic death rate due to age or competition and a probability of mutation…
The question as to why most higher organisms reproduce sexually has remained open despite extensive research, and has been called "the queen of problems in evolutionary biology". Theories dating back to Weismann have suggested that the key…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…
We introduce and analyze a general model of a population evolving over a network of selectively neutral genotypes. We show that the population's limit distribution on the neutral network is solely determined by the network topology and…