Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 11: Evolutionary Game Theory II (joint session BP / SOE / DY)

SOE 11.4: Talk

Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 14:45–15:00, MA 001

Counterintuitive findings for evolution on networks — •Laura Hindersin and Arne Traulsen — Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany

How does spatial population structure affect the fixation time of a novel mutation?

In the framework of evolutionary graph theory, individuals inhabit the nodes of a network. We study the Moran birth-death process, where reproduction happens with probability proportional to fitness. The links of a node determine which other individuals can be replaced by the offspring of that individual.

Intuitively, one might assume that adding a link to a given network would always decrease fixation time. However, a simple counter-example disproves this intuition. We show analytically for small networks, that adding a link can increase the fixation time. Simulating the stochastic process on larger lattices, we find a similar result. By adding links to a 2D-lattice without boundary conditions, the fixation time can increase as well. This shows the validity of our counterintuitive result even for larger populations.
[1] Hindersin L, Traulsen A. 2014 Counterintuitive properties of the fixation time in network-structured populations. J. R. Soc. Interface 11: 20140606. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0606