Biological evolution and statistical physics

By Barbara Drossel. 2001

356 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the majority of publications have appeared in biology journals. The review has three parts, which can be read independently. The first part deals with evolution in fitness landscapes and includes Fisher's theorem, adaptive walks, quasispecies models, effects of finite population sizes, and neutral evolution. The second part studies models of coevolution, including evolutionary game theory, kin selection, group selection, sexual selection, speciation, and coevolution of hosts and parasites. The third part discusses models for networks of interacting species and their extinction avalanches. Throughout the review, attention is paid to giving the necessary biological information, and to pointing out the assumptions underlying the models, and their limits of validity.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/413b98f01cfd5e9ee1cf8b09eade24c713424213

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Genetics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Life is Physics: Evolution as a Collective Phenomenon Far From Equilibrium (2010, methodology): “Most existing approaches to formulating evolutionary dynamics mathematically, as Drossel explicitly points out[28], share the limitation that the space in which evolution takes place is fixed.”
A beginners guide to adaptive dynamics (2002, background): “But even if we restrict our attention to random mating the map genotype×genotype→genotype is awfully more complicated than a simple Mendel picture suggests, due to the subtleties of crossing over/recombination when several loci are involved [2, 5, 11, 34, 88].”
Evolutionary game theory: Temporal and spatial effects beyond replicator dynamics (2009, background): “Since then, a lot of work has been done on this kind of models; we refer the reader to [2, 3, 4, 5] for reviews.”
Evolutionary games on graphs (2006, background): “If the population is finite there is a finite probability that a strategy becomes extinct by pure chance (Drossel, 2001). Drift usually has less relevance in large populations [for exceptions see, e.g., Traulsen et al. (2006c)], but becomes an important issue in the case of new mutants.”
The aptamer handbook : functional oligonucleotides and their applications (2006, background): “This biologically rather unrealistic fitness landscape still attracts considerable theoretical interest, mainly because it can be tackled analytically (Drossel, 2001).”
The Speed of Evolution in Large Asexual Populations (2009, background): “ve changes on the level of populations. Not surprisingly, then, statistical physicists always have been, and are now increasingly attracted to the study of evolutionary phenomena in biology (see e.g. [11,37,17,3]). In this article we focus on a speciﬁc, rather elementary ques tion in the mathematica”