Related papers: Evolution as fitness landscape navigation: Concept…
The parallel mutation-selection evolutionary dynamics, in which mutation and replication are independent events, is solved exactly in the case that the Malthusian fitnesses associated to the genomes are described by the Random Energy Model…
Effective locomotion in nature happens by transitioning across multiple modes (e.g., walk, run, climb). Despite this, far more mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion has been on how to generate and stabilize around…
Quantifying the adaptive landscape in a given dynamical processes has been one of most important goals in theoretical biology. It can have immediate implications for many dynamical properties, such as robustness and plasticity. Based on…
Landscape paradigm is ubiquitous in physics and other natural sciences, but it has to be supplemented with both quantitative and qualitatively meaningful tools for analyzing the topography of a given landscape. We here consider dynamic…
In evolution, the effects of a single deleterious mutation can sometimes be compensated for by a second mutation which recovers the original phenotype. Such epistatic interactions have implications for the structure of genome space -…
Connectomes are spatially embedded networks whose architecture has been shaped by physical constraints and communication needs throughout evolution. Using a decentralized navigation protocol, we investigate the relationship between the…
Evolutionary adaptation is often likened to climbing a hill or peak. While this process is simple for fitness landscapes where mutations are independent, the interaction between mutations (epistasis) as well as mutations at loci that affect…
Local search is widely used to solve combinatorial optimisation problems and to model biological evolution, but the performance of local search algorithms on different kinds of fitness landscapes is poorly understood. Here we consider how…
Morpho-evolution (ME) refers to the simultaneous optimisation of a robot's design and controller to maximise performance given a task and environment. Many genetic encodings have been proposed which are capable of representing design and…
We study biological evolution in a high-dimensional genotype space in the regime of rare mutations and strong selection. The population performs an uphill walk which terminates at local fitness maxima. Assigning fitness randomly to…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
How ecosystems respond to environmental perturbations is a fundamental question in ecology, made especially challenging due to the strong coupling between species and their environment. Here, we introduce a theoretical framework for…
The structure of ecological networks, in particular food webs, determines their ability to evolve further, i.e. evolvability. The knowledge about how food web evolvability is determined by the structures of diverse ecological networks can…
Geometric mechanics provides valuable insights into how biological and robotic systems use changes in shape to move by mechanically interacting with their environment. In high-friction environments it provides that the entire interaction is…
The mechanisms by which adaptive phenotypes spread within an evolving population after their emergence are understood fairly well. Much less is known about the factors that influence the evolutionary accessibility of such phenotypes, a…
This article explores the dynamics of savanna ecosystems with grazing, browsing, and migration effects. Covering over one-eighth of the Earth's land area and supporting about one-fifth of the global population, the savanna is an ecological…
Morphoelasticity represents a foundational theory for tracing back growth, remodelling, and morphogenesis, yet crucial challenges persist. A unified growth law -- independent of a priori assumptions about constitutive relations or specified…
A fundamental problem in ecology is to understand how competition shapes biodiversity and species coexistence. Historically, one important approach for addressing this question has been to analyze consumer resource models using geometric…
A fitness landscape is a mapping from the space of genetic sequences, which is modeled here as a binary hypercube of dimension $L$, to the real numbers. We consider random models of fitness landscapes, where fitness values are assigned…