Related papers: Adaptation in simple and complex fitness landscape…
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…
The adaptive evolution of large asexual populations is generally characterized by competition between clones carrying different beneficial mutations. This interference phenomenon slows down the adaptation speed and makes the theoretical…
We examine a model of biological evolution of Eigen's quasispecies in a holey fitness landscape, where the fitness of a site is either 0 (lethal site) or a uniform positive constant (viable site). So, the evolution dynamics is determined by…
We study the limit of many small mutations of a model of population dynamics. The population is structured by phonological traits and is spatially inhomogeneous. The various sub-populations compete for the same nutrient which diffuses…
We study the evolution of sexual and asexual populations in general fitness landscapes. We find deep relations between the mathematics of biological evolution and the formalism of quantum mechanics. We give the general structure of the…
Darwinian evolution can be modeled in general terms as a flow in the space of fitness (i.e. reproductive rate) distributions. In the diffusion approximation, Tsimring et al. have showed that this flow admits "fitness wave" solutions:…
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 propose a minimal model to simulate long waiting times followed by evolutionary bursts on rugged landscapes. It combines point and inversions-like mutations as sources of genetic variation. The inversions are intended to simulate one of…
We consider populations structured by a phenotypic trait and a space variable, in a non-homogeneous environment. In the case of sex- ual populations, we are able to derive models close to existing mod- els in theoretical biology, from a…
Background: The accumulation of deleterious mutations of a population directly contributes to the fate as to how long the population would exist. Muller's ratchet provides a quantitative framework to study the effect of accumulation.…
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…
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…
Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…
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 concept of a fitness landscape is a powerful metaphor that offers insight into various aspects of evolutionary processes and guidance for the study of evolution. Until recently, empirical evidence on the ruggedness of these landscapes…
In order to accommodate the empirical fact that population structures are rarely simple, modern studies of evolutionary dynamics allow for complicated and highly-heterogeneous spatial structures. As a result, one of the most difficult…
A microscopic model is developed, within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits, to study both numerically and analytically the combined effect of competition and assortativity on the sympatric speciation process, i.e. speciation in…
We consider a model of asexually reproducing individuals. The birth and death rates of the individuals are affected by a fitness parameter. The rate of mutations that cause the fitnesses to change is proportional to the population size, N.…
We study in detail a recently proposed simple discrete model for evolution on smooth landscapes. An asymptotic solution of this model for long times is constructed. We find that the dynamics of the population are governed by correlation…
In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…