Survival of the flattest, the fattest, or the fastest? Statistical mechanics of biological evolution

Michael Lässig (Köln)

Natural selection is an important factor in biological evolution. This is expressed in the famous Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest. According to this principle, populations should evolve towards a peak of a fitness landscape. However, selection competes with stochastic evolutionary forces, in particular, mutations and reproductive fluctuations. Moreover, selection itself is often time-dependent and sometimes stochastic: fitness becomes a dynamic seascape rather than a static landscape. Stochastic forces drive populations away fromsometimes stochastic: fitness becomes a dynamic seascape rather than a static landscape. Stochastic forces drive populations away from fitness peaks - but where do they end up? In this talk, I discuss principles for stochastic processes in molecular evolution, which establish links to the statistical physics concepts of entropy and entropy production. These principles will be applied to the evolution of gene regulation, of RNA structures, and of the influenza virus.

 

(Seminarraum I)

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