Related papers: Evolutionary Shaping of Low-Dimensional Path Facil…
A mechanism of sympatric speciation is presented based on the interaction-induced developmental plasticity of phenotypes. First, phenotypes of individuals with identical genotypes split into a few groups, according to instability in the…
Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…
The genotype-phenotype map is an essential object in our understanding of organismal complexity and adaptive properties, determining at once genomic plasticity and those constraints that may limit the ability of genomes to attain…
Plasticity-led evolution is a form of evolution where a change in the environment induces novel traits via phenotypic plasticity, after which the novel traits are genetically accommodated over generations under the novel environment. This…
We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…
Questions on possible relationship between phenotypic plasticity and evolvability, as well as that between robustness and evolution have been addressed over decades in the field of evolution-development. By introducing an evolutionary…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
We analytically study the dynamics of evolving populations that exhibit metastability on the level of phenotype or fitness. In constant selective environments, such metastable behavior is caused by two qualitatively different mechanisms.…
Evolutionary dynamics can be studied in well-mixed or structured populations. Population structure typically arises from the heterogeneous distribution of individuals in physical space or on social networks. Here we introduce a new type of…
Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…
Genotype-to-phenotype mappings translate genotypic variations such as mutations into phenotypic changes. Neutrality is the observation that some mutations do not lead to phenotypic changes. Studying the search trajectories in genotypic and…
Evolution is a dynamic process. The two classical forces of evolution are mutation and selection. Assuming small mutation rates, evolution can be predicted based solely on the fitness differences between phenotypes. Predicting an…
Organismal phenotypes emerge from a complex set of genotypic interactions. While technological advances in sequencing provide a quantitative description of an organism's genotype, characterization of an organism's physical phenotype lags…
The study of adaptive dynamics, involving many degrees of freedom on two separated timescales, one for fast changes of state variables and another for the slow adaptation of parameters controlling the former's dynamics is crucial for…
In general, cellular phenotypes, as measured by concentrations of cellular components, involve large degrees of freedom. However, recent measurement has demonstrated that phenotypic changes resulting from adaptation and evolution in…
Phenotypic plasticity and its evolution may help evolutionary rescue in a novel and stressful environment, especially if environmental novelty reveals cryptic genetic variation that enables the evolution of increased plasticity. However,…
Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…
The relationship between sequences and secondary structures or shapes in RNA exhibits robust statistical properties summarized by three notions: (1) the notion of a typical shape (that among all sequences of fixed length certain shapes are…
In evolution, the effects of a single deleterious mutation can sometimes be compensated for by a second mutation which recovers the original phenotype. Such epistatic interactions have implications for the structure of genome space -…
Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…