Related papers: Diversity in Evolutionary Dynamics
Genetic diversity is central to the process of evolution. Both natural selection and random genetic drift are influenced by the level of genetic diversity of a population; selection acts on diversity while drift samples from it. At a given…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
Species sharing a prey or a predator species may go extinct due to exploitative or apparent competition. We examine whether evolution of the shared species acts as a coexistence mechanism and to what extent the answer depends on the genetic…
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…
Environmental fluctuations have important consequences in the organization of ecological communities, and understanding how such a variability influences the biodiversity of an ecosystem is a major question in ecology. In this paper, we…
When predicting the fate and consequences of recurring deleterious mutations in self-fertilising populations most models developed make the assumption that populations have discrete non-overlapping generations. This makes them biologically…
Resource are often not uniformly distributed within a population. Spatial variations of concentration of a resource, change the fitness of competing strategies locally. The notion of fitness varying with respect to both genotype and…
In human societies the probability of strategy adoption from a given person may be affected by the personal features. Now we investigate how an artificially imposed restricted ability to reproduce, overruling ones fitness, affects an…
Competition between individuals drives the evolution of whole species. Although the fittest individuals survive the longest and produce the most offspring, in some circumstances the resulting species may not be optimally fit. Here, using…
Divergence between populations for a given trait can be driven by natural or sexual selection, interacting with migration behaviour. Mating preference for different phenotypes can lead to the emergence and persistence of differentiated…
Sexual reproduction in Nature requires two sexes, which raises the question why the reproductive scheme did not evolve to have three or more sexes. Here we construct a constrained optimization model based on the communication theory to…
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
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…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
We study the evolution of large but finite asexual populations evolving in fitness landscapes in which all mutations are either neutral or strongly deleterious. We demonstrate that despite the absence of higher fitness genotypes, adaptation…
Biological systems must be robust for stable function against perturbations, but robustness alone is not sufficient. The ability to switch between appropriate states (phenotypes) in response to different conditions is essential for…
During bouts of evolutionary diversification, such as adaptive radiations, the emerging species cluster around different locations in phenotype space, How such multimodal patterns in phenotype space can emerge from a single ancestral…
We consider the evolutionary trajectories traced out by an infinite population undergoing mutation-selection dynamics in static, uncorrelated random fitness landscapes. Starting from the population that consists of a single genotype, the…
We present a mathematical simplification for the evolutionary dynamics of a heritable trait within a two-sex population. This trait is assumed to control the timing of sex-specific life-history events, such as the age of sexual maturity and…