2015/10/19 by Anna Melbinger, Massimo Vergassola · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · #q-bio.PE #physics.bio-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/srep15211
published as Sci. Rep. 5, 15211 (2015) · previous shorter version of the article was published on arXiv under the title: Evolutionary Fitness in Variable Environments (arXiv:1505.04471) main text: 12 pages, 4 figures; supplement: 7 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2015/10/19 · arxiv updated 2015/10/21
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations, influence a species' prosperity and thereby its fitness. Interestingly, we find that not only larger growth rates but also reduced sensitivities to environmental changes substantially increase the fitness. Thereby, depending on the noise level of the environment, it might be an evolutionary successful strategy to minimize this sensitivity rather than to optimize the reproduction speed. Also for neutral evolution, where species with exactly the same properties compete, variability in the growth rates plays a crucial role. The time for one species to fixate is strongly reduced in the presence of environmental noise. Hence, environmental fluctuations constitute a possible explanation for effective population sizes inferred from genetic data that often are much smaller than the census population size.