Dynamic landscapes: a model of context and contingency in evolution.

Area of Science:

• Evolutionary biology
• Theoretical biology
• Computational biology

Background:

• The drivers of macroevolutionary phenomena remain debated, with ongoing discussion on the roles of genotype space fitness landscapes versus ecological interactions.
• Existing models often focus on either fitness landscapes or ecological dynamics, limiting comprehensive understanding.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a unified, simple model that integrates key features of both fitness-landscape and ecological models of evolution.
• To investigate evolutionary dynamics in a high-dimensional, structured genotype space incorporating interspecies interactions.

Main Methods:

• Development of a simplified model capturing essential aspects of fitness landscapes and ecological interactions.
• Simulation of evolutionary dynamics within a high-dimensional, structured genotype space with interspecies competition.
• Analysis of model outputs for qualitative similarities with empirical macroevolutionary data.

Main Results:

• The proposed model demonstrates qualitative agreement with empirical macroevolutionary observations.
• Model results show broadly distributed extinction sizes, consistent with real-world data.
• The model accurately reproduces realistic exploration patterns within the genotype space.

Conclusions:

• The integrated model provides a valuable framework for understanding macroevolutionary processes.
• The model's abstract nature allows for broad applicability, extending to protein and RNA evolution.
• This work bridges the gap between genotype-centric and ecology-centric views of evolution.