Related papers: Natural selection at multiple scales
Genetically identical cells in the same population can take on phenotypically variable states, leading to differentiated responses to external signals, such as nutrients and drug-induced stress. Many models and experiments have focused on a…
In this paper, we inspect well-known population genetics and social dynamics models. In these models, interacting individuals, while participating in a self-organizing process, give rise to the emergence of complex behaviors and patterns.…
In evolutionary processes, population structure has a substantial effect on natural selection. Here, we analyze how motion of individuals affects constant selection in structured populations. Motion is relevant because it leads to changes…
Sexual selection is a fundamental aspect of evolution for all eukaryotic organisms with mating types. This paper suggests intersexual selection is best viewed as a mechanism to compensate for the unavoidable dynamics of coevolution between…
This paper focuses on the maximum speed at which biological evolution can occur. I derive inequalities that limit the rate of evolutionary processes driven by natural selection, mutations, or genetic drift. These \emph{rate limits} link the…
Natural populations often show enhanced genetic drift consistent with a strong skew in their offspring number distribution. The skew arises because the variability of family sizes is either inherently strong or amplified by population…
Since protein mutations are the main driving force of evolution at the molecular level, a proper analysis of them (and the factors controlling them) will enable us to find a response to several crucial queries in evolutionary biology. Among…
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…
In many indigenous societies, people are categorised into several cultural groups, or clans, within which they believe to share ancestors. Clan attributions provide certain rules for marriage and descent. Such rules between clans constitute…
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…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
The contribution to an organism's phenotype from one genetic locus may depend upon the status of other loci. Such epistatic interactions among loci are now recognized as fundamental to shaping the process of adaptation in evolving…
It is likely that the strength of selection acting upon a mutation varies through time due to changes in the environment. However, most population genetic theory assumes that the strength of selection remains constant. Here we investigate…
Organisms from microbes to humans engage in a variety of social behaviors, which affect fitness in complex, often nonlinear ways. The question of how these behaviors evolve has consequences ranging from antibiotic resistance to human…
Evolutionary branching is analysed in a stochastic, individual-based population model under mutation and selection. In such models, the common assumption is that individual reproduction and life career are characterised by values of a…
We define a novel quantitative strategy inspired by the ecological notion of nestedness to single out the scale at which innovation complexity emerges from the aggregation of specialized building blocks. Our analysis not only suggests that…
Clonal interference, competition between multiple co-occurring beneficial mutations, has a major role in adaptation of asexual populations. We provide a simple individual based stochastic model of clonal interference taking into account a…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…
Frequency-dependent selection reflects the interaction between different species as they battle for limited resources in their environment. In a stochastic evolutionary game the species relative fitnesses guides the evolutionary dynamics…
When three species compete cyclically in a well-mixed, stochastic system of $N$ individuals, extinction is known to typically occur at times scaling as the system size $N$. This happens, for example, in rock-paper-scissors games or…