Dresden 2014 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 34: Symposium SYGP: Stochastic Dynamics of Growth Processes in Biological and Social Systems

DY 34.3: Invited Talk

Thursday, April 3, 2014, 16:00–16:30, HSZ 02

Stochastic population dynamics on rugged fitness landscapes — •Joachim Krug — Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität zu Köln

Biological evolution is inherently noisy because of random mutations and stochasticity induced by sampling in finite populations. Since the sampling noise is inversely proportional to population size, one expects deterministic dynamics to emerge in large populations, but in practice this regime is hardly every attainable and fluctuations dominate the behavior even in the largest microbial populations. In this talk I will show how the interplay of the stochastic population dynamics with the structure of the underlying fitness landscape can lead to counter-intuitive phenomena such as an adaptive advantage of small populations and a non-monotonic dependence of evolutionary predictability on population size. If time permits, the adaptive benefits of recombination in rugged fitness landscapes will be briefly addressed as well. The talk is based on joint work with Kavita Jain, Johannes Neidhart, Stefan Nowak, Su-Chan Park, Ivan Szendro and Arjan de Visser.