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We show that the Tangled Nature model can be interpreted as a general formulation of the quasi-species model by Eigen et al. in a frequency dependent fitness landscape. We present a detailed theoretical derivation of the mutation threshold,…
Mutational robustness quantifies the effect of random mutations on fitness. When mutational robustness is high, most mutations do not change fitness or have only a minor effect on it. From the point of view of fitness landscapes, robust…
Many theoretical and experimental studies suggest that range expansions can have severe consequences for the gene pool of the expanding population. Due to strongly enhanced genetic drift at the advancing frontier, neutral and weakly…
We show that textual analysis of microbial genomes reveal telling footprints of the early evolution of the genomes. The frequencies of word occurrence of random DNA sequences considered as texts in their four nucleotides are expected to…
We study in detail a recently proposed simple discrete model for evolution on smooth landscapes. An asymptotic solution of this model for long times is constructed. We find that the dynamics of the population are governed by correlation…
Evolutionary algorithms are known to be robust to noise in the evaluation of the fitness. In particular, larger offspring population sizes often lead to strong robustness. We analyze to what extent the $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic…
Competition between random genetic drift and natural selection plays a central role in evolution: Whereas non-beneficial mutations often prevail in small populations by chance, mutations that sweep through large populations typically confer…
Large sets of genotypes give rise to the same phenotype because phenotypic expression is highly redundant. Accordingly, a population can accept mutations without altering its phenotype, as long as thegenotype mutates into another one on the…
Consider a mathematical model of evolutionary adaptation of fitness landscape and mutation matrix as a reaction to population changes. As a basis, we use an open quasispecies model, which is modified to include explicit death flow. We…
We propose a variation of the GMS model of evolution of species. In this version, as in the GMS model, at each birth, the new species in the system is labeled with a random fitness mark, but in our variation, to each extinction event is…
As pathogens spread in a population of hosts, immunity is built up and the pool of susceptible individuals is depleted. This generates selective pressure, to which many human RNA viruses, such as influenza virus or SARS-CoV-2, respond with…
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…
How natural selection acts to limit the proliferation of transposable elements (TEs) in genomes has been of interest to evolutionary biologists for many years. To describe TE dynamics in populations, many previous studies have used models…
We consider the evolution of an asexually reproducing population in an uncorrelated random fitness landscape in the limit of infinite genome size, which implies that each mutation generates a new fitness value drawn from a probability…
A mutator is an allele that increases the mutation rate throughout the genome by disrupting some aspect of DNA replication or repair. Mutators that increase the mutation rate by the order of 100 fold have been observed to spontaneously…
This paper reports on patterns exhibiting self-replication with spontaneous, inheritable mutations and exponential genetic drift in Neural Cellular Automata. Despite the models not being explicitly trained for mutation or inheritability,…
Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…
We present a novel approach allowing the study of rare events like fixation under fluctuating environments, modeled as extrinsic noise, in evolutionary processes characterized by the dominance of one species. Our treatment consists of…
The concept of neutral evolutionary networks being a significant factor in evolutionary dynamics was first proposed by Huynen {\em et al.} about 7 years ago. In one sense, the principle is easy to state -- because most mutations to an…
In a letter published in Molecular Biology Evolution [10], Chen and Zhang argue that the variation of the mutation rate along the Escherichia coli genome that we recently reported [3] cannot be evolutionarily optimised. To support this…