Related papers: Evolutionary Shaping of Low-Dimensional Path Facil…
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
Evolution by Natural Selection is a process by which progeny inherit some properties from their progenitors with small variation. These properties are subject to Natural Selection and are called adaptive traits and carriers of the latter…
The effect of phenotypic plasticity on evolution, the so-called Baldwin effect, has been studied extensively for more than 100 years. Plasticity is known to influence the speed of evolution towards a specific genetic configuration, but…
Understanding the observed variability in the number of homologs of a gene is a very important, unsolved problem that has broad implications for research into co-evolution of structure and function, gene duplication, pseudogene formation…
Evolution is simultaneously driven by a number of processes such as mutation, competition and random sampling. Understanding which of these processes is dominating the collective evolutionary dynamics in dependence on system properties is a…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…
By defining the phenotype of a biopolymer by its active three-dimensional shape, and its genotype by its primary sequence, we propose a model that predicts and characterizes the statistical distribution of a population of biopolymers with a…
In this paper we explore the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a predator-prey model, where the prey population is structured according to a certain life history trait. The trait distribution within the prey population is the result of interplay…
We derive an expression for the variation between parallel trajectories in phenotypic evolution, extending the well known result that predicts the mean evolutionary path in adaptive dynamics or quantitative genetics. We show how this…
Epistasis describes the phenomenon that mutations at different loci do not have independent effects with regard to certain phenotypes. Understanding the global epistatic landscape is vital for many genetic and evolutionary theories. Current…
Both external environmental selection and internal lower-level evolution are essential for an integral picture of evolution. This paper proposes that the division of internal evolution into DNA/RNA pattern formation (genotype) and protein…
The evolutionary balance between innate and learned behaviors is highly intricate, and different organisms have found different solutions to this problem. We hypothesize that the emergence and exact form of learning behaviors is naturally…
Organisms adapt to fluctuating environments by regulating their dynamics, and by adjusting their phenotypes to environmental changes. We model population growth using multitype branching processes in random environments, where the offspring…
Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…
A central goal in ecology is to understand how biodiversity is maintained. Previous theoretical works have employed the rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game as a toy model, demonstrating that population mobility is crucial in determining the…
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…
A fitness landscape is a genetic space -- with two genotypes adjacent if they differ in a single locus -- and a fitness function. Evolutionary dynamics produce a flow on this landscape from lower fitness to higher; reaching equilibrium only…
The capability of cells to form surface extensions to non-locally probe the surrounding environment plays a key role in cell migration. The existing mathematical models for migration of cell populations driven by this non-local form of…