Related papers: Effective Fitness Landscapes for Evolutionary Syst…
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…
A fitness landscape is a genetic space -- with two genotypes adjacent if they differ in a single locus -- and a fitness function. Evolutionary dynamics produce a flow on this landscape from lower fitness to higher; reaching equilibrium only…
A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…
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…
The basic mechanics of evolution have been understood since Darwin. But debate continues over whether macroevolutionary phenomena are driven primary by the fitness structure of genotype space or by ecological interaction. In this paper we…
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.…
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…
Phenotypic evolution implies sequential fixations of new genomic sequences. The speed at which these mutations fixate depends, in part, on the relative fitness (selection coefficient) of the mutant vs. the ancestor. Using a simple…
The idea of adaptive walks on fitness landscapes as a means of studying evolutionary processes on large time scales is extended to fitness landscapes that are slowly changing over time. The influence of ruggedness and of the amount of…
Darwinian evolution is driven by random mutations, genetic recombination (gene shuffling) and selection that favors genotypes with high fitness. For systems where each genotype can be represented as a bitstring of length $L$, an overview of…
Species do not merely evolve, they also coevolve with other organisms. Coevolution is a major force driving interacting species to continuously evolve ex- ploring their fitness landscapes. Coevolution involves the coupling of species fit-…
Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…
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…
We find an advantage of recombination for a category of complex fitness landscapes. Recent studies of empirical fitness landscapes reveal complex gene interactions and multiple peaks, and recombination can be a powerful mechanism for…
On rugged fitness landscapes where sign epistasis is common, adaptation can often involve either individually beneficial "uphill" mutations or more complex mutational trajectories involving fitness valleys or plateaus. The dynamics of the…
The class of epistatic fitness landscapes is much more diverse than the class of non-epistatic landscapes, and so it stands to reason that there exist dynamical phenomena that can only be realized in the presence of epistasis. Here, we…
Evolution depends on the fitness of organisms, the expected rate of reproducing. Directly getting offspring is the most basic form of fitness, but fitness can also be increased indirectly by helping genetically related individuals (such as…
In this paper we investigate error-thresholds on dynamics fitness-landscapes. We show that there exists both lower and an upper threshold, representing limits to the copying fidelity of simple replicators. The lower bound can be expressed…
We study self-replicating molecules under externally varying conditions. Changing conditions such as temperature variations and/or alterations in the environment's resource composition lead to both non-constant replication and decay rates…
In evolutionary algorithms, the fitness of a population increases with time by mutating and recombining individuals and by a biased selection of more fit individuals. The right selection pressure is critical in ensuring sufficient…