Related papers: Biological evolution through mutation, selection, …
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…
Population dynamics of a competitive two-species system under the influence of random events are analyzed and expressions for the steady-state population mean, fluctuations, and cross-correlation of the two species are presented. It is…
The intensification and increased frequency of weather extremes is emerging as one of the most important aspects of climate change. We use Monte Carlo simulation to understand and predict the consequences of variations in trends (i.e.,…
Understanding if and how mutants reach fixation in populations is an important question in evolutionary biology. We study the impact of population growth has on the success of mutants. To systematically understand the effects of growth we…
This work presents a population genetic model of evolution, which includes haploid selection, mutation, recombination, and drift. The mutation-selection equilibrium can be expressed exactly in closed form for arbitrary fitness functions…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
Recent microbial experiments suggest that enhanced genetic drift at the frontier of a two-dimensional range expansion can cause genetic sectoring patterns with fractal domain boundaries. Here, we propose and analyze a simple model of…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
Populations of replicating entities frequently experience sudden or cyclical changes in environment. We explore the implications of this phenomenon via a environmental switching parameter in several common evolutionary dynamics models…
McNamara and Dall (2011) identified novel relationships between the abundance of a species in different environments, the temporal properties of environmental change, and selection for or against dispersal. Here, the mathematics underlying…
Predicting evolution of expanding populations is critical to control biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with examples of…
Understanding under what conditions populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, persist is an issue of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and environmental fluctuations…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
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…
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…
The processes and mechanisms underlying the origin and maintenance of biological diversity have long been of central importance in ecology and evolution. The competitive exclusion principle states that the number of coexisting species is…
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…