Related papers: Evolution on distributive lattices
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.…
A microscopic agent dynamical model for diploid age-structured populations is used to study evolution of polymorphism and sympatric speciation. The underlying ecology is represented by a unimodal distribution of resources of some width.…
The emergence and maintenance of cooperative behavior is a fascinating topic in evolutionary biology and social science. The public goods game (PGG) is a paradigm for exploring cooperative behavior. In PGG, the total resulting payoff is…
Is evolution always gradual or can it make leaps? We examine a mathematical model of an evolutionary process on a fitness landscape and obtain analytic solutions for the probability of multi-mutation leaps, that is, several mutations…
Bacterial populations often have complex spatial structures, which can impact their evolution. Here, we study how spatial structure affects the evolution of antibiotic resistance in a bacterial population. We consider a minimal model of…
Viruses evolve in the background of host immune systems that exert selective pressure and drive viral evolutionary trajectories. This interaction leads to different evolutionary patterns in antigenic space. Examples observed in nature…
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…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
The design of protocols to suppress the propagation of viral infections is an enduring enterprise, especially hindered by limited knowledge of the mechanisms through which extinction of infection propagation comes about. We here report on a…
Risk-driven behavior provides a feedback mechanism through which individuals both shape and are collectively affected by an epidemic. We introduce a general and flexible compartmental model to study the effect of heterogeneity in the…
Evolution is a dynamic process. The two classical forces of evolution are mutation and selection. Assuming small mutation rates, evolution can be predicted based solely on the fitness differences between phenotypes. Predicting an…
Competition between independently arising beneficial mutations is enhanced in spatial populations due to the linear rather than exponential growth of clones. Recent theoretical studies have pointed out that the resulting fitness dynamics is…
Organisms modulate their fitness in heterogeneous environments by dispersing. Prior work shows that there is selection against "unconditional" dispersal in spatially heterogeneous environments. "Unconditional" means individuals disperse at…
We discuss a population of sequences subject to mutations and frequency-dependent selection, where the fitness of a sequence depends on the composition of the entire population. This type of dynamics is crucial to understand the evolution…
Human pathogens transmitted through environmental pathways are subject to stress and pressures outside of the host. These pressures may cause pathogen pathovars to diverge in their environmental persistence and their infectivity on an…
The fitness of a biological strategy is typically measured by its expected reproductive rate, the first moment of its offspring distribution. However, strategies with high expected rates can also have high probabilities of extinction. A…
Using a lattice model based on Monte Carlo simulations, we study the role of the reproduction pattern on the fate of an evolving population. Each individual is under the selection pressure from the environment and random mutations. The…
Species sharing a prey or a predator species may go extinct due to exploitative or apparent competition. We examine whether evolution of the shared species acts as a coexistence mechanism and to what extent the answer depends on the genetic…
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…
Involution, a phenomenon of excessive competition with diminishing returns, has become a pressing socio-economic concern in contemporary China, prompting both academic inquiry and policy interventions. This paper proposes an evolutionary…