Evolutionary landscapes and retrospective processes
Evolutionary landscapes and retrospective processes"
- Date: Dec 6, 2021
- Time: 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Dr. Matteo Smerlak, Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig
- Location: virtual platform
- Host: Silvia De Monte
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.