Related papers: Evolutionary Shaping of Low-Dimensional Path Facil…
In this paper we study a class of stochastic individual-based models that describe the evolution of haploid populations where each individual is characterised by a phenotype and a genotype. The phenotype of an individual determines its…
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,…
1) Micro-evolutionary predictions are complicated by ecological feedbacks like density dependence, while ecological predictions can be complicated by evolutionary change. A widely used approach in micro-evolution, quantitative genetics,…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
Functional effects of different mutations are known to combine to the total effect in highly nontrivial ways. For the trait under evolutionary selection (`fitness'), measured values over all possible combinations of a set of mutations yield…
Cellular decision making allows cells to assume functionally different phenotypes in response to microenvironmental cues, without genetic change. It is an open question, how individual cell decisions influence the dynamics at the tissue…
A theoretical and experimental analysis is made of the effects of self-adaptation in a simple evolving system. Specifically, we consider the effects of coding the mutation and crossover probabilities of a genetic algorithm evolving in…
In this work we propose a physical model of organismal evolution, where phenotype, organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype i.e. the stability of its proteins which can be determined exactly in the model. Simulating the…
How do the same mechanisms that faithfully regenerate complex developmental programs in spite of environmental and genetic perturbations also permit responsiveness to environmental signals, adaptation, and genetic evolution? Using the…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
Robustness to genetic or environmental disturbances is often considered as a key property of living systems. Yet, in spite of being discussed since the 1950s, how robustness emerges from the complexity of genetic architectures and how it…
Biological systems encode function not primarily in steady states, but in the structure of transient responses elicited by time-varying stimuli. Overshoots, biphasic dynamics, adaptation kinetics, fold-change detection, entrainment, and…
Diverse biological networks exhibit universal features distinguished from those of random networks, calling much attention to their origins and implications. Here we propose a minimal evolution model of Boolean regulatory networks, which…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…
Reversibility of state transitions is intensively studied topic in many scientific disciplines over many years. In cell biology, it plays an important role in epigenetic variation of phenotypes, known as phenotypic plasticity. More…
Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…
Multistable gene regulatory systems sustain different levels of gene expression under identical external conditions. Such multistability is used to encode phenotypic states in processes including nutrient uptake and persistence in bacteria,…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of an idealised model for the robust self-assembly of two-dimensional structures called polyominoes. The model includes rules that encode interactions between sets of square tiles that drive the…
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…
An increasing number of dissident voices claim that the standard neo-Darwinian view of genes as 'leaders' and phenotypes as 'followers' during the process of adaptive evolution should be turned on its head. This idea is older than the…