A Replicative Perspective on Evolutionary Dynamics

A Replicative Perspective on Evolutionary Dynamics PDF Author: Mika Pantzar
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789519282473
Category : Business enterprises
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description

A Replicative Perspective on Evolutionary Dynamics

A Replicative Perspective on Evolutionary Dynamics PDF Author: Mika Pantzar
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789519282473
Category : Business enterprises
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description


Evolutionary Dynamics

Evolutionary Dynamics PDF Author: Martin A. Nowak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674417755
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
At a time of unprecedented expansion in the life sciences, evolution is the one theory that transcends all of biology. Any observation of a living system must ultimately be interpreted in the context of its evolution. Evolutionary change is the consequence of mutation and natural selection, which are two concepts that can be described by mathematical equations. Evolutionary Dynamics is concerned with these equations of life. In this book, Martin A. Nowak draws on the languages of biology and mathematics to outline the mathematical principles according to which life evolves. His work introduces readers to the powerful yet simple laws that govern the evolution of living systems, no matter how complicated they might seem. Evolution has become a mathematical theory, Nowak suggests, and any idea of an evolutionary process or mechanism should be studied in the context of the mathematical equations of evolutionary dynamics. His book presents a range of analytical tools that can be used to this end: fitness landscapes, mutation matrices, genomic sequence space, random drift, quasispecies, replicators, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, games in finite and infinite populations, evolutionary graph theory, games on grids, evolutionary kaleidoscopes, fractals, and spatial chaos. Nowak then shows how evolutionary dynamics applies to critical real-world problems, including the progression of viral diseases such as AIDS, the virulence of infectious agents, the unpredictable mutations that lead to cancer, the evolution of altruism, and even the evolution of human language. His book makes a clear and compelling case for understanding every living system—and everything that arises as a consequence of living systems—in terms of evolutionary dynamics.

Evolutionary Dynamics

Evolutionary Dynamics PDF Author: Martin A. Nowak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674417747
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
At a time of unprecedented expansion in the life sciences, evolution is the one theory that transcends all of biology. Any observation of a living system must ultimately be interpreted in the context of its evolution. Evolutionary change is the consequence of mutation and natural selection, which are two concepts that can be described by mathematical equations. Evolutionary Dynamics is concerned with these equations of life. In this book, Martin A. Nowak draws on the languages of biology and mathematics to outline the mathematical principles according to which life evolves. His work introduces readers to the powerful yet simple laws that govern the evolution of living systems, no matter how complicated they might seem. Evolution has become a mathematical theory, Nowak suggests, and any idea of an evolutionary process or mechanism should be studied in the context of the mathematical equations of evolutionary dynamics. His book presents a range of analytical tools that can be used to this end: fitness landscapes, mutation matrices, genomic sequence space, random drift, quasispecies, replicators, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, games in finite and infinite populations, evolutionary graph theory, games on grids, evolutionary kaleidoscopes, fractals, and spatial chaos. Nowak then shows how evolutionary dynamics applies to critical real-world problems, including the progression of viral diseases such as AIDS, the virulence of infectious agents, the unpredictable mutations that lead to cancer, the evolution of altruism, and even the evolution of human language. His book makes a clear and compelling case for understanding every living system—and everything that arises as a consequence of living systems—in terms of evolutionary dynamics.

Evolutionary Dynamics

Evolutionary Dynamics PDF Author: James Patrick Crutchfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195142655
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
The 14 chapters of this volume, which present an overview of new research in evolutionary dynamics, were first presented at a conference held in October 1998 at the Santa Fe Institute. The main divisions of the book are macroevolution; epochal evolution; population genetics, dynamics, and optimization; and evolution of cooperation. Individual topics include spectral landscape theory, external triggers in biological evolution, and evolutionary dynamics of asexual reproduction. Several of the contributors, like the editors, are affiliated with the Sante Fe Institute; others teach or work in physics, genetics, biology, computational neuroscience, and theoretical chemistry at universities and private institutions in the US, UK, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Israel, and Germany. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Analysis of Evolutionary Processes

Analysis of Evolutionary Processes PDF Author: Fabio Dercole
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400828341
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Quantitative approaches to evolutionary biology traditionally consider evolutionary change in isolation from an important pressure in natural selection: the demography of coevolving populations. In Analysis of Evolutionary Processes, Fabio Dercole and Sergio Rinaldi have written the first comprehensive book on Adaptive Dynamics (AD), a quantitative modeling approach that explicitly links evolutionary changes to demographic ones. The book shows how the so-called AD canonical equation can answer questions of paramount interest in biology, engineering, and the social sciences, especially economics. After introducing the basics of evolutionary processes and classifying available modeling approaches, Dercole and Rinaldi give a detailed presentation of the derivation of the AD canonical equation, an ordinary differential equation that focuses on evolutionary processes driven by rare and small innovations. The authors then look at important features of evolutionary dynamics as viewed through the lens of AD. They present their discovery of the first chaotic evolutionary attractor, which calls into question the common view that coevolution produces exquisitely harmonious adaptations between species. And, opening up potential new lines of research by providing the first application of AD to economics, they show how AD can explain the emergence of technological variety. Analysis of Evolutionary Processes will interest anyone looking for a self-contained treatment of AD for self-study or teaching, including graduate students and researchers in mathematical and theoretical biology, applied mathematics, and theoretical economics.

Evolution, Games, and God

Evolution, Games, and God PDF Author: Martin A. Nowak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674075536
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
According to the reigning competition-driven model of evolution, selfish behaviors that maximize an organism’s reproductive potential offer a fitness advantage over self-sacrificing behaviors—rendering unselfish behavior for the sake of others a mystery that requires extra explanation. Evolution, Games, and God addresses this conundrum by exploring how cooperation, working alongside mutation and natural selection, plays a critical role in populations from microbes to human societies. Inheriting a tendency to cooperate, argue the contributors to this book, may be as beneficial as the self-preserving instincts usually thought to be decisive in evolutionary dynamics. Assembling experts in mathematical biology, history of science, psychology, philosophy, and theology, Martin Nowak and Sarah Coakley take an interdisciplinary approach to the terms “cooperation” and “altruism.” Using game theory, the authors elucidate mechanisms by which cooperation—a form of working together in which one individual benefits at the cost of another—arises through natural selection. They then examine altruism—cooperation which includes the sometimes conscious choice to act sacrificially for the collective good—as a key concept in scientific attempts to explain the origins of morality. Discoveries in cooperation go beyond the spread of genes in a population to include the spread of cultural transformations such as languages, ethics, and religious systems of meaning. The authors resist the presumption that theology and evolutionary theory are inevitably at odds. Rather, in rationally presenting a number of theological interpretations of the phenomena of cooperation and altruism, they find evolutionary explanation and theology to be strongly compatible.

Critical Phenomena in Evolutionary Dynamics

Critical Phenomena in Evolutionary Dynamics PDF Author: Michael Linn Manapat
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
This thesis consists of five essays on evolutionary dynamics. In Chapters 1 and 2, we study the evolution of trust from the perspective of game theory. In the trust game, two players have a chance to win a sum of money. The "investor" begins with one monetary unit. She gives a fraction of that unit to the "trustee." The amount she gives is multiplied by a factor greater than one. The trustee then returns a fraction of what he receives to the investor. In a non-repeated game, a rational trustee will return nothing. Hence, a rational investor will give nothing. In behavioral experiments, however, humans exhibit significant levels of trust and trustworthiness. Here we show that these predispositions may be the result of evolutionary adaptations. We find that when investors have information about trustees, investors become completely trusting and trustees assume the minimum level of trustworthiness that justifies that trust. "Reputation" leads to efficient outcomes as the two players split all the possible payoff from the game, but the trustee captures most of the gains: "seller" reputation helps "sellers" more than it helps "buyers." Investors can capture more of the surplus if they are collectively irrational: they can demand more from trustees than is rational, or their sensitivity to information about trustees can be dulled. Collective investor irrationality surprisingly leads to higher payoffs for investors, but each investor has an incentive to deviate from this behavior and act more rationally. Eventually investors evolve to be highly rational and lose the gains their collective behavior had earned them: irrationality is a public good in the trust game. Next, we describe two evolutionarily robust mechanisms for achieving efficient outcomes that favor the investor while still compensating trustees for the value of their agency. In the first mechanism, "comparison shopping," investors compare limited information about various trustees before committing to a transaction. Comparing just two trustees at the beginning of each interaction is enough to achieve a split desirable to the investor, even when information about trustees is only partially available. In the other mechanism, a second layer of information is added so that trustees sometimes know what rates of return investors desire. The trust game then becomes similar to an ultimatum game, and positive investor outcomes can be reached once this second type of information is sufficiently pervasive. In Chapter 3, we study the origin of evolution and replication. We propose "prelife" and "prevolution" as the logical precursors of life and evolution. Prelife generates sequences of variable length. Prelife is a generative chemistry that proliferates information and produces diversity without replication. The resulting "prevolutionary dynamics" have mutation and selection. We propose an equation that allows us to investigate the origin of evolution. In one limit, this "originator equation" gives the classical selection equation. In the other limit, we obtain "prelife." There is competition between life and prelife and there can be selection for or against replication. Simple prelife equations with uniform rate constants have the property that longer sequences are exponentially less frequent than shorter ones. But replication can reverse such an ordering. As the replication rate increases, some longer sequences can become more frequent than shorter ones. Thus, replication can lead to "reversals" in the equilibrium portraits. We study these reversals, which mark the transition from prelife to life in our model. If the replication potential exceeds a critical value, then life replicates into existence. We continue our study of replication in Chapter 4, taking a more concrete, chemistry-oriented approach. Template-directed polymerization of nucleotides is believed to be a pathway for the replication of genetic material in the earliest cells. Adding template-directed polymerization changes the equilibrium structure of prelife if the rate constants meet certain criteria. In particular, if the basic reproductive ratio of sequences of a certain length exceeds one, then those sequences can attain high abundance. Furthermore, if many sequences replicate, then the longest sequences can reach high abundance even if the basic reproductive ratios of all sequences are less than one. We call this phenomenon "subcritical life." Subcritical life suggests that sequences long enough to be ribozymes can become abundant even if replication is relatively inefficient. Our work on the evolution of replication has interesting parallels to infection dynamics. Life (replication) can be seen as an infection of prelife. Finally, in Chapter 5, we study the emergence of complexity in early biochemical systems. RNA biochemistry is characterized by large differences in synthetic yield, reactivity to polymerization, and degradation rate, and these properties are believed to result in pools of highly homogeneous, low complexity sequences. Using simulations of prebiotic chemical systems, we show that template-directed ligation and the mass-action effect of sequence concatenation increase the average complexity and population diversity in pools of RNA molecules. We verify these theoretical results with experiments showing that ligation does enhance complexity in real RNA systems. We also find a correlation between predicted RNA folding energy and complexity, demonstrating the functional importance of this measure. These results contrast with previous assumptions that fine-tuning of the system is the only way to achieve high complexity. Our work shows that the chemical mechanisms involved in nucleic acid polymerization and oligomerization predispose the RNA world towards a diverse pool of complex, energetically stable sequences, setting the stage for the appearance of catalytic activity prior to the onset of natural selection.

Eco-evolutionary Dynamics

Eco-evolutionary Dynamics PDF Author: Andrew P. Hendry
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691204179
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
In recent years, scientists have realized that evolution can occur on timescales much shorter than the 'long lapse of ages' emphasized by Darwin - in fact, evolutionary change is occurring all around us all the time. This work provides an authoritative and accessible introduction to eco-evolutionary dynamics, a cutting-edge new field that seeks to unify evolution and ecology into a common conceptual framework focusing on rapid and dynamic environmental and evolutionary change.

Starvation in Bacteria

Starvation in Bacteria PDF Author: S. Kjelleberg
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1489924396
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Concerted efforts to study starvation and survival of nondifferentiating vegeta tive heterotrophic bacteria have been made with various degrees of intensity, in different bacteria and contexts, over more than the last 30 years. As with bacterial growth in natural ecosystem conditions, these research efforts have been intermittent, with rather long periods of limited or no production in between. While several important and well-received reviews and proceedings on the topic of this monograph have been published during the last three to four decades, the last few years have seen a marked increase in reviews on starvation survival in non-spore-forming bacteria. This increase reflects a realization that the biology of bacteria in natural conditions is generally not that of logarithmic growth and that we have very limited information on the physiology of the energy-and nutrient-limited phases of the life cyde of the bacterial cello The growing interest in nongrowing bacteria also sterns from the more recent advances on the molecular basis of the starvation-induced nongrowing bacterial cello The identification of starvation-specific gene and protein re sponders in Escherichia coli as weIl as other bacterial species has provided molecular handles for our attempts to decipher the "differentiation-like" responses and programs that nondifferentiating bacteria exhibit on nutrient limited growth arrest. Severallaboratories have contributed greatly to the progress made in life after-log research.

Origin and Evolution of Viruses

Origin and Evolution of Viruses PDF Author: Esteban Domingo
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080564968
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 573

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Book Description
New viral diseases are emerging continuously. Viruses adapt to new environments at astounding rates. Genetic variability of viruses jeopardizes vaccine efficacy. For many viruses mutants resistant to antiviral agents or host immune responses arise readily, for example, with HIV and influenza. These variations are all of utmost importance for human and animal health as they have prevented us from controlling these epidemic pathogens. This book focuses on the mechanisms that viruses use to evolve, survive and cause disease in their hosts. Covering human, animal, plant and bacterial viruses, it provides both the basic foundations for the evolutionary dynamics of viruses and specific examples of emerging diseases. NEW - methods to establish relationships among viruses and the mechanisms that affect virus evolution UNIQUE - combines theoretical concepts in evolution with detailed analyses of the evolution of important virus groups SPECIFIC - Bacterial, plant, animal and human viruses are compared regarding their interation with their hosts