Related papers: The Evolutionary Unfolding of Complexity
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
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…
Fitness landscapes are mappings between genotypes, phenotypes, and fitness that shape evolution. In recent years, empirical work and theoretical models have greatly advanced our understanding of how populations navigate rugged fitness…
Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Darwinian evolution can be illustrated as an uphill walk in a landscape, where the surface consists of genotypes, the height coordinates represent fitness, and each step corresponds to a point mutation. Epistasis, roughly defined as the…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
In large asexual populations, multiple beneficial mutations arise in the population, compete, interfere with each other, and accumulate on the same genome, before any of them fix. The resulting dynamics, although studied by many authors, is…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
When studying the dynamics of trait distribution of populations in a heterogeneous environment, classical models from quantitative genetics choose to look at its system of moments, specifically the first two ones. Additionally, in order to…
The possibility of complicated dynamic behaviour driven by non-linear feedbacks in dynamical systems has revolutionized science in the latter part of the last century. Yet despite examples of complicated frequency dynamics, the possibility…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
We study the evolution of artificial learning systems by means of selection. Genetic programming is used to generate a sequence of populations of algorithms which can be used by neural networks for supervised learning of a rule that…
Evolution is a dynamic process. The two classical forces of evolution are mutation and selection. Assuming small mutation rates, evolution can be predicted based solely on the fitness differences between phenotypes. Predicting an…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
We consider an asexual population evolving on rugged fitness landscapes which are defined on the multi-dimensional genotypic space and have many local optima. We track the most populated genotype as it changes when the population jumps from…
Genetic interactions can strongly influence the fitness effects of individual mutations, yet the impact of these epistatic interactions on evolutionary dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the evolutionary role of…