1998/11/13 by Claus O. Wilke, Wilke, Claus O.
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO) #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantitative Biology (q-bio) #adap-org #nlin.AO #physics.bio-ph #q-bio
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.physics/9811021
16 pages, 7 figures Latex
arxiv created 1998/11/13 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
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 the progress of evolution. Nevertheless, the small step to time-dependent fitness landscapes has most of the time not been taken. In this work, some elements of a theory of adaptive walks on changing fitness landscapes are proposed, and are subsequently applied to and tested on a simple family of time-dependent fitness landscapes, the oscillating NK landscapes, also introduced here. For these landscapes, the parameter governing the evolutionary dynamics is the fraction of static fitness contributions fS. For small fS, local optima are virtually non-existent, and the adaptive walk constantly encounters new genotypes, whereas for large fS, the evolutionary dynamics reduces to the one on static fitness landscapes. Evidence is presented that the transition between the two regimes is a 2nd order phase transition akin a percolation transition. For fS close to the critical point, a rich dynamics can be observed. The adaptive walk gets trapped in noisy limit cycles, and transitions from one noisy limit cycle to another occur sporadically.