Evolutionary accessibility of random and structured fitness landscapes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Krug, Joachim, Oros, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Krug, Joachim
Oros, Daniel
author_facet Krug, Joachim
Oros, Daniel
contents Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of fitness landscapes with a focus on their evolutionary accessibility, where a path in a fitness landscape is said to be accessible if the fitness values encountered along the path increase monotonically. For uncorrelated (random) landscapes with independent and identically distributed fitness values, the probability of existence of accessible paths between genotypes at a distance linear in the sequence length $L$ becomes nonzero at a nontrivial threshold value of the fitness difference between the initial and final genotype, which can be explicitly computed for large classes of genotype graphs. The behaviour in uncorrelated random landscapes is contrasted with landscape models that display additional, biologically motivated structural features. In particular, landscapes defined by a tradeoff between adaptation to environmental extremes have been found to display a combinatorially large number of accessible paths to all local fitness maxima. We show that this property is characteristic of a broad class of models that satisfy a certain global constraint, and provide further examples from this class.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_17432
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evolutionary accessibility of random and structured fitness landscapes
Krug, Joachim
Oros, Daniel
Populations and Evolution
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Probability
Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of fitness landscapes with a focus on their evolutionary accessibility, where a path in a fitness landscape is said to be accessible if the fitness values encountered along the path increase monotonically. For uncorrelated (random) landscapes with independent and identically distributed fitness values, the probability of existence of accessible paths between genotypes at a distance linear in the sequence length $L$ becomes nonzero at a nontrivial threshold value of the fitness difference between the initial and final genotype, which can be explicitly computed for large classes of genotype graphs. The behaviour in uncorrelated random landscapes is contrasted with landscape models that display additional, biologically motivated structural features. In particular, landscapes defined by a tradeoff between adaptation to environmental extremes have been found to display a combinatorially large number of accessible paths to all local fitness maxima. We show that this property is characteristic of a broad class of models that satisfy a certain global constraint, and provide further examples from this class.
title Evolutionary accessibility of random and structured fitness landscapes
topic Populations and Evolution
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17432