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Adlam, Ben

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Adlam

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Adlam, Ben
Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.4cfff3fa-4111-44b8-94c1-113fa445adf0

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    The Time Scale of Evolutionary Innovation
    (Public Library of Science, 2014) Chatterjee, Krishnendu; Pavlogiannis, Andreas; Adlam, Ben; Nowak, Martin
    A fundamental question in biology is the following: what is the time scale that is needed for evolutionary innovations? There are many results that characterize single steps in terms of the fixation time of new mutants arising in populations of certain size and structure. But here we ask a different question, which is concerned with the much longer time scale of evolutionary trajectories: how long does it take for a population exploring a fitness landscape to find target sequences that encode new biological functions? Our key variable is the length, of the genetic sequence that undergoes adaptation. In computer science there is a crucial distinction between problems that require algorithms which take polynomial or exponential time. The latter are considered to be intractable. Here we develop a theoretical approach that allows us to estimate the time of evolution as function of We show that adaptation on many fitness landscapes takes time that is exponential in even if there are broad selection gradients and many targets uniformly distributed in sequence space. These negative results lead us to search for specific mechanisms that allow evolution to work on polynomial time scales. We study a regeneration process and show that it enables evolution to work in polynomial time.
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    Cellular cooperation with shift updating and repulsion
    (Nature Publishing Group, 2015) Pavlogiannis, Andreas; Chatterjee, Krishnendu; Adlam, Ben; Nowak, Martin
    Population structure can facilitate evolution of cooperation. In a structured population, cooperators can form clusters which resist exploitation by defectors. Recently, it was observed that a shift update rule is an extremely strong amplifier of cooperation in a one dimensional spatial model. For the shift update rule, an individual is chosen for reproduction proportional to fecundity; the offspring is placed next to the parent; a random individual dies. Subsequently, the population is rearranged (shifted) until all individual cells are again evenly spaced out. For large population size and a one dimensional population structure, the shift update rule favors cooperation for any benefit-to-cost ratio greater than one. But every attempt to generalize shift updating to higher dimensions while maintaining its strong effect has failed. The reason is that in two dimensions the clusters are fragmented by the movements caused by rearranging the cells. Here we introduce the natural phenomenon of a repulsive force between cells of different types. After a birth and death event, the cells are being rearranged minimizing the overall energy expenditure. If the repulsive force is sufficiently high, shift becomes a strong promoter of cooperation in two dimensions.