Universality of fixation probabilities in randomly structured populations

Abstract

The stage of evolution is the population of reproducing individuals. The structure of the population is known to affect the dynamics and outcome of evolutionary processes, but analytical results for generic random structures have been lacking. The most general result so far, the isothermal theorem, assumes the propensity for change in each position is exactly the same, but realistic biological structures are always subject to variation and noise. We consider a finite population under constant selection whose structure is given by a variety of weighted, directed, random graphs; vertices represent individuals and edges interactions between individuals. By establishing a robustness result for the isothermal theorem and using large deviation estimates to understand the typical structure of random graphs, we prove that for a generalization of the Erdős-Rényi model, the fixation probability of an invading mutant is approximately the same as that of a mutant of equal fitness in a well-mixed population with high probability. Simulations of perturbed lattices, small-world networks, and scale-free networks behave similarly. We conjecture that the fixation probability in a well-mixed population, (1 − r−1)/(1 − r−n), is universal: for many random graph models, the fixation probability approaches the above function uniformly as the graphs become large.