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Tag Archives: fitness landscapes
Male battles split species apart
This post is by MSU postdoc Jason Keagy How do species form? Stated more precisely, how does one species become two? This turns out to be an immensely difficult question to answer, because 1) species are not always distinct entities (species … Continue reading
Tortoises, hares, and topography: how fitness landscape structure affects the speed of adaptation
Hello fellow BEACONites and interested members of the public, I’m Josh Nahum, a postdoctoral fellow, who was at the University of Washington during the early years of the Beacon Center, but now I’m doing research at Michigan State University (more … Continue reading
Visualizing coevolution in dynamic fitness landscapes
This post and video is by postdoc Bjørn Østman and graduate student Randy Olson, both at Michigan State University. The fitness landscape is the framework for thinking about evolutionary processes the same way the phylogenetic tree is how we think about … Continue reading
Posted in BEACON Researchers at Work
Tagged coevolution, fitness landscapes, host-parasite coevolution, video
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Using fitness landscapes to visualize evolution in action
BEACONites Bjørn Østman and Randy Olson created a video to visualize evolution in action using fitness landscapes. Read about it below! Fitness landscapes were invented by Sewall Wright in 1932. They map fitness, or reproductive success, of individual organisms as a function … Continue reading
BEACON Researchers at Work: Holey Fitness Landscapes
This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by MSU postdoc Bjørn Østman, and is also posted on his research website. What do real fitness landscapes look like? Do they look more like the image on the left, a nearly-neutral holey … Continue reading
Evolution 101: Fitness Landscapes
This week’s Evolution 101 blog post is by MSU postdoc Arend Hintze and MSU graduate student Randy Olson. While fitness landscapes are generally thought to be more of a theoretical construct, they are in fact quite tangible and underly every … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution 101
Tagged Evolution 101, fitness, fitness landscapes, mutations
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Evolution 101: Epistasis
This week’s Evolution 101 post is by MSU postdoc Bjørn Østman. Bjørn also blogs at Pleiotropy. What is epistasis? Epistasis is a measure of the strength of epistatic interactions. Epistatic interactions are non-additive interactions between alleles, loci, or mutations. That is, … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution 101
Tagged epistasis, Evolution 101, fitness, fitness landscapes
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Evolution of Music Illustrates Epistatic Interactions
In today’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, BEACONite Chris Adami comments on a research article by MacCallum, Mauch, Burt & Leroy on “The evolution of music by public choice.” Much like the digital evolution techniques used … Continue reading