Related papers: Tierra's missing neutrality: case solved
Neutral evolution is the simplest model of molecular evolution and thus it is most amenable to a comprehensive theoretical investigation. In this paper, we characterize the statistical properties of neutral evolution of proteins under the…
Hubbell's neutral theory of biodiversity has successfully explained the observed composition of many ecological communities but it relies on strict demographic equivalence among species and provides no room for evolutionary processes like…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
RNA secondary structure is an important computational model to understand how genetic variation maps into phenotypic (structural) variation. Evolutionary innovation in RNA structures is facilitated by neutral networks, large connected sets…
Evolution on neutral networks of genotypes has been found in models to concentrate on genotypes with high mutational robustness, to a degree determined by the topology of the network. Here analysis is generalized beyond neutral networks to…
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…
An important parameter in the study of population evolution is $\theta=4N\nu$, where $N$ is the effective population size and $\nu$ is the rate of mutation per locus per generation. Therefore, $\theta$ represents the mean number of…
We study the evolution of the network properties of a populated network embedded in a genotype space characterised by either a low or a high number of potential links, with particular emphasis on the connectivity and clustering. Evolution…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
Patterns of biodiversity predicted by the neutral theory rely on a simple phenomenological model of speciation. To further investigate the effect of speciation on neutral biodiversity, we analyze a spatially-explicit neutral model based on…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
Self-adaptation is used in all main paradigms of evolutionary computation to increase efficiency. We claim that the basis of self-adaptation is the use of neutrality. In the absence of external control neutrality allows a variation of the…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
We simulate the evolution of a protein-like sequence subject to point mutations, imposing conservation of the ground state, thermodynamic stability and fast folding. Our model is aimed at describing neutral evolution of natural proteins. We…
Neutral models, in which individual agents with equal fitness undergo a birth-death-mutation process, are very popular in population genetics and community ecology. Usually these models are applied to populations and communities with…
Despite its radical assumption of ecological equivalence between species, neutral biodiversity theory can often provide good fits to species abundance distributions observed in nature. Major criticisms of neutral theory have focused on…
Social networks exhibit strikingly systematic patterns across a wide range of human contexts. While genetic variation accounts for a significant portion of the variation in many complex social behaviors, the heritability of egocentric…
We propose a minimal model of the dynamics of diversity -- replicator equations with extinction, invasion and mutation. We numerically study the behavior of this simple model and show that it displays completely different behavior from the…
The current theory of evolution is almost the one Darwin and Wallace proposed two centuries ago and the following discoveries e.g., Mendelian genetics and neutral mutation theory have not made significant modifications. The current…
The current rate of species extinction is rapidly approaching unprecedented highs and life on Earth presently faces a sixth mass extinction event driven by anthropogenic activity, climate change and ecological collapse. The field of…