Related papers: Diploid versus Haploid Organisms
When beneficial mutations are rare, they accumulate by a series of selective sweeps. But when they are common, many beneficial mutations will occur before any can fix, so there will be many different mutant lineages in the population…
How self-incompatibility systems are maintained in plant populations is still a debated issue. Theoretical models predict that self-incompatibility systems break down according to the intensity of inbreeding depression and number of…
It has recently been suggested that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. Thereafter the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution tuning the amount and…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…
Social insect colonies can be seen as a distinct form of biological organization because they function as superorganisms. Understanding how natural selection acts on the emergence and maintenance of these colonies remains a major question…
A bit-string model for the evolution of a population of haploid organisms, subject to competition, reproduction with mutation and selection is studied, using mean field theory and Monte Carlo simulations. We show that, depending on…
The famous "two-fold cost of sex" is really the cost of anisogamy -- why should females mate with males who do not contribute resources to offspring, rather than isogamous partners who contribute equally? In typical anisogamous populations,…
Motivated by the cyclic pattern of reproductive regimes observed in some species of green flies (``{\it aphids}''), we simulate the evolution of a population enduring harsh seasonal conditions for survival. The reproductive regime of each…
We define a general class of models representing natural selection between two alleles. The population size and spatial structure are arbitrary, but fixed. Genetics can be haploid, diploid, or otherwise; reproduction can be asexual or…
The evolution of microbial and viral organisms often generates clonal interference, a mode of competition between genetic clades within a population. In this paper, we show that interference strongly constrains the genetic and phenotypic…
Most conspicuous organisms are multicellular and most multicellular organisms develop somatic cells to perform specific, non-reproductive tasks. The ubiquity of this division of labor suggests that it is highly advantageous. In this paper,…
Genetic diversity is central to the process of evolution. Both natural selection and random genetic drift are influenced by the level of genetic diversity of a population; selection acts on diversity while drift samples from it. At a given…
Gene duplication is believed to play a major role in the evolution of genomic complexity. The presence of a duplicate removes the constraint of natural selection upon the gene, leading to its likely loss of function or, occasionally, the…
In species reproducing both sexually and asexually clones are often more common in recently established populations. Earlier studies have suggested that this pattern arises from natural selection favouring asexual recruitment in young…
The evolution of multicellularity was a major transition in the history of life on earth. Conditions under which multicellularity is favored have been studied theoretically and experimentally. But since the construction of a multicellular…
Species sharing a prey or a predator species may go extinct due to exploitative or apparent competition. We examine whether evolution of the shared species acts as a coexistence mechanism and to what extent the answer depends on the genetic…
Heterozygote disadvantage is potentially a potent driver of population genetic divergence. Also referred to as underdominance, this phenomena describes a situation where a genetic heterozygote has a lower overall fitness than either…
Many biological populations exhibit diversity in their strategy for survival and reproduction in a given environment, and microbes are an example. We explore the fate of different strategies under sustained environmental change by…
The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…
In this paper we investigate a structured population model with distributed delay. Our model incorporates two different types of nonlinearities. Specifically we assume that individual growth and mortality are affected by scramble…