Speeding up evolutionary search by small fitness fluctuations

Abstract

We consider a fixed size population that undergoes an evolutionary adaptation in the weak mutuation rate limit, which we model as a biased Langevin process in the genotype space. We show analytically and numerically that, if the fitness landscape has a small highly epistatic (rough) and time-varying component, then the population genotype exhibits a high effective diffusion in the genotype space and is able to escape local fitness minima with a large probability. We argue that our principal finding that even very small time-dependent fluctuations of fitness can substantially speed up evolution is valid for a wide class of models.

12 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (1)

• The unified geometric theory of mesoscopic stochastic pumps and reversible ratchets

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Quantization and Fractional Quantization of Currents in Periodically Driven Stochastic Systems I: Average Currents
• Adaptation and irreversibility in microevolution
• Absolute negative mobility in evolution