Does Good Mutation Help You Live Longer?

Abstract

We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows linearly with time $t$, while in the opposite case the average fitness is constant. For no mutational bias, the average fitness grows as t^{2/3}. The average age of the population remains finite in all cases and paradoxically is a decreasing function of the overall population fitness.

4 pages, 2 figures, RevTeX revised version, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (2)

• A Bit-String Model for Biological Aging
• Evolution on a smooth landscape

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