Evolutionary landscapes and retrospective processes

Like other processes across the sciences, micro-evolution is powered by the interaction of multiplicative growth (selection) and diffusive transport (mutations). In the presence of disorder, these opposing forces can generate localized structures and bursty dynamics, a phenomenon known as "intermittency" in non-equilibrium physics and as "punctuated equilibrium" in evolutionary theory. This behaviour is difficult to forecast; in particular there is no general principle to locate the regions where the system will settle, how long it will stay there, or where it will jump next. In this talk I will introduce a Markovian representation of growth-transport dynamics that closes these gaps. This “retrospective view” of evolution unifies the concepts of linear intermittency and metastability, and provides a generally applicable method to reduce, and predict, the dynamics of disordered linear systems. Applications range from Zeld'dovich's parabolic Anderson model to Eigen's quasispecies model of molecular evolution.