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Updated: May 20, 2026

Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations
Published on: February 3, 2023
Speeding up Evolutionary Search by Small Fitness Fluctuations
Jakub Otwinowski1, Sorin Tanase-Nicola, Ilya Nemenman
1Department of Physics, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA jotwinowski@physics.emory.edu.
Abstract:
We consider a fixed size population that undergoes an evolutionary adaptation in the weak mutation rate limit, which we model as a biased Langevin process in the genotype space. We show analytically and numerically that, if the fitness landscape has a small highly epistatic (rough) and time-varying component, then the population genotype exhibits a high effective diffusion in the genotype space and is able to escape local fitness minima with a large probability. We argue that our principal finding that even very small time-dependent fluctuations of fitness can substantially speed up evolution is valid for a wide class of models.
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