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Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory

Most evolutionary thinking is based on the notion of fitness and related ideas such as fitness landscapes and evolutionary optima. Nevertheless, it is often unclear what fitness actually is, and its meaning often depends on the context. Here we argue that fitness should not be a basal ingredient in...

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Autores principales: Doebeli, Michael, Ispolatov, Yaroslav, Simon, Burt
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5333952/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28198700
http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23804
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author Doebeli, Michael
Ispolatov, Yaroslav
Simon, Burt
author_facet Doebeli, Michael
Ispolatov, Yaroslav
Simon, Burt
author_sort Doebeli, Michael
collection PubMed
description Most evolutionary thinking is based on the notion of fitness and related ideas such as fitness landscapes and evolutionary optima. Nevertheless, it is often unclear what fitness actually is, and its meaning often depends on the context. Here we argue that fitness should not be a basal ingredient in verbal or mathematical descriptions of evolution. Instead, we propose that evolutionary birth-death processes, in which individuals give birth and die at ever-changing rates, should be the basis of evolutionary theory, because such processes capture the fundamental events that generate evolutionary dynamics. In evolutionary birth-death processes, fitness is at best a derived quantity, and owing to the potential complexity of such processes, there is no guarantee that there is a simple scalar, such as fitness, that would describe long-term evolutionary outcomes. We discuss how evolutionary birth-death processes can provide useful perspectives on a number of central issues in evolution. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23804.001
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spelling pubmed-53339522017-03-06 Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory Doebeli, Michael Ispolatov, Yaroslav Simon, Burt eLife Ecology Most evolutionary thinking is based on the notion of fitness and related ideas such as fitness landscapes and evolutionary optima. Nevertheless, it is often unclear what fitness actually is, and its meaning often depends on the context. Here we argue that fitness should not be a basal ingredient in verbal or mathematical descriptions of evolution. Instead, we propose that evolutionary birth-death processes, in which individuals give birth and die at ever-changing rates, should be the basis of evolutionary theory, because such processes capture the fundamental events that generate evolutionary dynamics. In evolutionary birth-death processes, fitness is at best a derived quantity, and owing to the potential complexity of such processes, there is no guarantee that there is a simple scalar, such as fitness, that would describe long-term evolutionary outcomes. We discuss how evolutionary birth-death processes can provide useful perspectives on a number of central issues in evolution. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23804.001 eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2017-02-15 /pmc/articles/PMC5333952/ /pubmed/28198700 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23804 Text en © 2017, Doebeli et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Ecology
Doebeli, Michael
Ispolatov, Yaroslav
Simon, Burt
Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory
title Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory
title_full Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory
title_fullStr Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory
title_full_unstemmed Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory
title_short Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory
title_sort towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory
topic Ecology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5333952/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28198700
http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23804
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