Related papers: Evolution as fitness landscape navigation: Concept…

Random walks on multidimensional nonlinear landscapes are of interest in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, properties of adaptive trajectories on fitness landscapes determine population fates and thus play a central role…

These notes introduce probabilistic landscape models defined on high-dimensional discrete sequence spaces. The models are motivated primarily by fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology, but links to statistical physics and computer…

The class of epistatic fitness landscapes is much more diverse than the class of non-epistatic landscapes, and so it stands to reason that there exist dynamical phenomena that can only be realized in the presence of epistasis. Here, we…

The concept of fitness is introduced, and a simple derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (which states that the average fitness of a population increases if its variance is nonzero) is given. After a short discussion of…

We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…

A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…

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…

The relationship between the shape of a fitness landscape and the underlying gene interactions, or epistasis, has been extensively studied in the two-locus case. Gene interactions among multiple loci are usually reduced to two-way…

Fitness landscapes are genotype to fitness mappings commonly used in evolutionary biology and computer science which are closely related to spin glass models. In this paper, we study the NK model for fitness landscapes where the interaction…

Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…

We introduce a new model of evolution on a fitness landscape possessing a tunable degree of neutrality. The model allows us to study the general properties of molecular species undergoing neutral evolution. We find that a number of…

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…

It has recently been noted that the relative prevalence of the various kinds of epistasis varies along an adaptive walk. This has been explained as a result of mean regression in NK model fitness landscapes. Here we show that this…

The factors that influence genetic architecture shape the structure of the fitness landscape, and therefore play a large role in the evolutionary dynamics. Here the NK model is used to investigate how epistasis and pleiotropy -- key…

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…

Understanding how genotypes map onto phenotypes, fitness, and eventually organisms is arguably the next major missing piece in a fully predictive theory of evolution. We refer to this generally as the problem of the genotype-phenotype map.…

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…

Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…

Due to stochastic fluctuations arising from finite population size, known as genetic drift, the ability of a population to explore a rugged fitness landscape depends on its size. In the weak mutation regime, while the mean steady-state…

Evolvability refers to the ability of an individual genotype (solution) to produce offspring with mutually diverse phenotypes. Recent research has demonstrated that divergent search methods, particularly novelty search, promote evolvability…