Related papers: Small world effects in evolution

Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…

We study a continuous time model for the frequency distribution of an infinitely large asexual population in which both beneficial and deleterious mutations occur and the fitness is additive. When beneficial mutations are ignored, the exact…

We study the adaptation dynamics of an initially maladapted population evolving via the elementary processes of mutation and selection. The evolution occurs on rugged fitness landscapes which are defined on the multi-dimensional genotypic…

Evolutionary dynamics and patterns of molecular evolution are strongly influenced by selection on linked regions of the genome, but our quantitative understanding of these effects remains incomplete. Recent work has focused on predicting…

In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…

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…

Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…

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…

The adaptive evolution of large asexual populations is generally characterized by competition between clones carrying different beneficial mutations. This interference phenomenon slows down the adaptation speed and makes the theoretical…

We investigate an simple evolutionary game of sequences and demonstrate on this example the structure of fitness landscapes in discrete problems. We show the smoothing action of the genotype-phenotype mapping which still makes it feasible…

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…

Organisms modulate their fitness in heterogeneous environments by dispersing. Prior work shows that there is selection against "unconditional" dispersal in spatially heterogeneous environments. "Unconditional" means individuals disperse at…

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…

The small-world effect is a universal feature used to explain many different phenomena like percolation, diffusion, and consensus. Starting from any regular lattice of $N$ sites, the small-world effect can be attained by rewiring randomly…

The nature of epistasis has important consequences for the evolutionary significance of sex and recombination. Recent efforts to find negative epistasis as source of negative linkage disequilibrium and associated long-term sex advantage…

Many species see their range shifted poleward in response to global warming and need to keep pace in order to survive. To understand the effect of climate change on species ranges and its consequences on population dynamics, we consider a…

The dynamics of a population expanding into unoccupied habitat has been primarily studied for situations in which growth and dispersal parameters are uniform in space or vary in one dimension. Here we study the influence of finite-sized…

Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…

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…

We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…