Related papers: Breaking records in the evolutionary race
The parallel mutation-selection evolutionary dynamics, in which mutation and replication are independent events, is solved exactly in the case that the Malthusian fitnesses associated to the genomes are described by the Random Energy Model…
In this work we propose a physical model of organismal evolution, where phenotype, organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype i.e. the stability of its proteins which can be determined exactly in the model. Simulating the…
Stochastic models, based on random processes, may lead to power law distributions, which provide long range correlations. The observation of power law behavior and the presence of long range correlations in biological systems has been…
All possible phenotypes are not equally accessible to evolving populations. In fact, only phenotypes of large size, i.e. those resulting from many different genotypes, are found in populations of sequences, presumably because they are…
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the…
We re-examine the evolutionary dynamics of RNA secondary structures under directional selection towards an optimum RNA structure. We find that the punctuated equilibria lead to a very slow approach to the optimum, following on average an…
We consider a fixed size population that undergoes an evolutionary adaptation in the weak mutuation rate limit, which we model as a biased Langevin process in the genotype space. We show analytically and numerically that, if the fitness…
Species evolution is essentially a random process of interaction between biological populations and their environments. As a result, some physical parameters in evolution models are subject to statistical fluctuations. In this paper, two…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
In this review some simple models of asexual populations evolving on smooth landscapes are studied. The basic model is based on a cellular automaton, which is analyzed here in the spatial mean-field limit. Firstly, the evolution on a fixed…
The quasispecies model was introduced in 1971 by Manfred Eigen to discuss the first stages of life on Earth. It provides an appealing mathematical framework to study the evolution of populations in biology, for instance viruses. We present…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…
This chapter is an overview of foundational results in the mathematical theory of replicator systems. Its primary aim is to provide a unified framework for the mathematical formalisation of evolutionary processes in the spirit of…
The adaptation rate in theoretical models of biological evolution increases with the mutation rate but only to a point when mutations into lethal states cause extinction. One would expect that removing such states should be beneficial for…
In this paper we consider two continuous-mass population models as analogues of logistic branching random walks, one is supported on a finite trait space and the other one is supported on an infinite trait space. For the first model with…
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…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
The quasi-species equation describes the evolution of the probability that a random individual in a population carries a given genome. Here we map the quasi-species equation for individuals of a self-reproducing population to an ensemble of…
We reconsider the Eigen's quasi-species model for competing self-reproductive macromolecules in populations characterized by a single-peaked fitness landscape. The use of ideas and tools borrowed from polymers theory and statistical…