Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory
- University of British Columbia, Canada
- Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Chile
- University of Colorado, Denver, United States
Abstract
Most evolutionary thinking is based on the notion of fitness and related ideas such as fitness landscapes and evolutionary optima. Nevertheless, it is often unclear what fitness actually is, and its meaning often depends on the context. Here we argue that fitness should not be a basal ingredient in verbal or mathematical descriptions of evolution. Instead, we propose that evolutionary birth-death processes, in which individuals give birth and die at ever-changing rates, should be the basis of evolutionary theory, because such processes capture the fundamental events that generate evolutionary dynamics. In evolutionary birth-death processes, fitness is at best a derived quantity, and owing to the potential complexity of such processes, there is no guarantee that there is a simple scalar, such as fitness, that would describe long-term evolutionary outcomes. We discuss how evolutionary birth-death processes can provide useful perspectives on a number of central issues in evolution.
Article and author information
Author details
Yaroslav Ispolatov
Funding
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (219930)
- Michael Doebeli
Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (1151524)
- Yaroslav Ispolatov
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
- Michael Doebeli
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Doebeli et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory
eLife 6:e23804.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23804
