Related papers: Does Good Mutation Help You Live Longer?
We examine the dynamics of an age-structured population model in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of the parent. While the total population of the system always reaches a steady state, the…
How fast does a population evolve from one fitness peak to another? We study the dynamics of evolving, asexually reproducing populations in which a certain number of mutations jointly confer a fitness advantage. We consider the time until a…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…
We consider a model of a population of fixed size $N$ undergoing selection. Each individual acquires beneficial mutations at rate $\mu_N$, and each beneficial mutation increases the individual's fitness by $s_N$. Each individual dies at…
Aging is thought to be a consequence of intrinsic breakdowns in how genetic information is processed. But mounting experimental evidence suggests that aging can be slowed. To help resolve this mystery, I derive a mortality equation which…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
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…
We consider a model of asexually reproducing individuals with random mutations and selection. The rate of mutations is proportional to the population size, $N$. The mutations may be either beneficial or deleterious. In a paper by Yu,…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
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…
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…
We study the evolution of large but finite asexual populations evolving in fitness landscapes in which all mutations are either neutral or strongly deleterious. We demonstrate that despite the absence of higher fitness genotypes, adaptation…
The paper discusses a connection between asymmetric reproduction -- that is reproduction in a parent-child relationship where the parent does not mutate during reproduction --, the fact that all non-viral lifeforms bear genes of their…
We investigate two stochastic models of a growing population subject to selection and mutation. In our models each individual carries a fitness which determines its mean offspring number. Many of these offspring inherit their parent's…
For two genotypes that have the same mean number of offspring but differ in the variance in offspring number, natural selection will favor the genotype with lower variance. The concept of fitness becomes cloudy under these conditions…
We consider a model of a population with fixed size $N$, which is subjected to an unlimited supply of beneficial mutations at a constant rate $\mu_N$. Individuals with $k$ beneficial mutations have the fitness $(1+s_N)^k$. Each individual…
The rate of biological evolution depends on the fixation probability and on the fixation time of new mutants. Intensive research has focused on identifying population structures that augment the fixation probability of advantageous mutants.…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…