Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

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

SOE 11.2: Talk

Tuesday, March 13, 2018, 12:45–13:00, MA 001

Exiting the Primordial Soup -- Transition from Pre-Darwinian to Darwinian Evolution — Charlotte V. Vogelbusch¹, Steven H Strogatz², •Hinrich Arnoldt¹, and Marc Timme¹ — ¹Chair for Network Dynamics, Institute for Theoretical Physics and Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany — ²Department of Mathematics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

Darwin proposed the now-accepted existence of a last universal common ancestor (LUCA) from which all species emerged in an evolutionary process. Life on earth just before LUCA was fundamentally collective - a primordial soup - as ancient life forms shared their genetic material freely through massive horizontal gene transfer (HGT). How to exit this collective state and start Darwinian evolution is far from understood and heavily debated. Here we present a minimal model for this hypothesized "Darwinian transition." The model suggests that HGT-dominated dynamics may have been intermittently interrupted by selection-driven processes during which genotypes became fitter and decreased their inclination toward HGT. Stochastic switching in the population dynamics may have destabilized the HGT-dominated collective state and led to the emergence of vertical descent, the first well-defined species, and thus started Darwinian evolution [1]. Moreover, advanced models with dynamic inclination to HGT competence suggest a viable route from collective pre-Darwinian to vertical Darwinian evolution and hint to a constrained exit window in parameter space. Ref.: [1] Phys. Rev. E 92, 052909 (2015)