Evolutionary Models of Structured Populations: Integrating Methods

Contribution List

1. Sensitivity Analysis

Hal Caswell

05/09/2018, 10:00

Tutorial: Sensitivity Analysis

2. Welcome

Laura Hindersin, Stefano Giaimo

05/09/2018, 14:00

3. Keynote: Models of cultural evolution in structured populations

Nicole Creanza

05/09/2018, 14:05

Many foundational models of social learning and cultural evolution are constructed within the framework of theoretical population genetics. With genetic evolution as a starting point, models of cultural evolution emphasize that cultural traits—learned behaviors such as beliefs, practices, and tools—can be transmitted between individuals and are subject to evolutionary forces such as
selection...

4. The genetic consequences of social structure

Barbara Parreira

05/09/2018, 14:50

In many species individuals live in socially structured populations, forming behaviorally cohesive groups with kinship structure, which can range from temporary pair-bounded aggregations to very complex societies, as observed in many mammals. Despite its ubiquity social structure is ignored by most population genetics models. The traditional genetic approach envisions and models populations of...

5. Invasion fitness for gene-culture co-evolution in family-structured populations

Charles Mullon

05/09/2018, 15:10

Human evolution depends crucially on the co-evolution between genetically determined behaviours and socially transmitted cultural information. Although vertical transmission of cultural information from parent to offspring is extremely common in hominins, its effects on cultural evolution are not well understood. We therefore investigated gene-culture co-evolution in a family-structured...

6. Keynote: Imperfect transmission and the evolution of social behavior in spatially structured populations

Florence Débarre

05/09/2018, 16:00

The theoretical investigation of how spatial structure affects the evolution of social behavior has mostly been done under the assumption that parent-offspring strategy transmission is perfect, i.e., for genetically transmitted traits, that mutation is very weak or absent. In this talk, we investigate the evolution of social behavior in structured populations under arbitrary mutation...

7. The replicator dynamics for multilevel selection in evolutionary games

Daniel Cooney

05/09/2018, 16:45

We consider a model of evolutionary game theory in group-structured populations, extending Luo and Mattingly’s multilevel selection framework to account for frequency dependent selection. In the limit of infinite group size and infinite number of groups, we derive a non-local PDE that describes the probability distribution of group compositions in the population. For special families of payoff...

8. Stirring does not make populations well mixed: The effect of motion on fixation probability

Francisco Herrerías-Azcué

05/09/2018, 17:05

In evolutionary dynamics, the notion of a “well-mixed” population is usually associated with all-to-all interactions at all times. This assumption simplifies the mathematics of evolutionary processes, and makes analytical solutions possible. At the same time the term “well-mixed” suggests that this situation can be achieved by physically stirring the population. Using simulations of...

9. The cancellation effect at the group level

Aslıhan Akdeniz

05/09/2018, 17:25

Group selection models combine selection pressure at the individual level with selection pressure at the group level (Boyd and Richerson, 2009; Luo, 2014; Simon, 2010; Simon et al., 2013; Sober and Wilson, 1998; Traulsen and Nowak, 2006; Wilson and Wilson, 2007). Cooperation can be costly for individuals, but beneficial for the group, and therefore, if groups are sufficiently much assorted,...

10. Keynote: Looking for fitness in all the wrong places: fitness as a multidimensional operator

Hal Caswell

06/09/2018, 09:00

Co-Author: Charlotte de Vries
Classical population genetics has this concept called "fitness." It is a scalar measure and in that theory, it serves three functions. It encapsulates, in a single number, all of the demographic processes of survival and reproduction that determine the transmission of genes. It also implies a projection of population size and composition over time, based on those...

11. Biological pest control using cannibalistic predators and with provision of additional food

Sree Rama Vara Prasad Bhuvanagiri

06/09/2018, 09:45

Cannibalism is a conspecific lethal interaction, a typical phenomenon in many natural populations, which is used as a ``life-boat strategy" to avoid circumstances leading to extinction. It is observed in many experimental studies that the cannibalistic nature of natural enemies deters the outcome of biological pest control programs. One of the ways to deviate natural enemies from conspecific...

12. Signatures and detection of selective sweeps in subdivided populations with various migration rates

Yichen Zheng

06/09/2018, 10:05

There exists a large number of measures and algorithms designed to detect the effects of positive selection from population genetic or genomic data. However, most of these methods are based on a panmictic population model, while real-life populations often consist of subpopulations (demes) with limited migration. In such cases, a few extra factors exist compared to the standard selection...

16. Keynote: Eco-evolutionary dynamics of life cycle complexity

André M. de Roos

06/09/2018, 11:00

The majority of species is characterised by a complex life cycle, in which individuals grow substantially during life or pass through several distinct life history stages and occupy different ecological niches during their life. In turn, these characteristics of the individual life history shape the ecological context in which evolution takes place through the impact of the population on its...

17. Does developmental plasticity influence speciation?

Thomas Ezard

06/09/2018, 11:45

Environmental cues affect phenotypic traits at the given life stage when they occur, but can also canalise later development down particular paths. The evolutionary consequences of developmental plasticity or canalisation are increasingly clear within species, but we lack fundamental data on these consequences for the macroevolutionary emergence of new species. Empirical evidence of...

18. Evolution of life cycles in early multicellularity

Yuriy Pichugin

06/09/2018, 12:05

Reproduction is a defining feature of living systems. To reproduce, aggregates of biological units (e.g., multicellular organisms or colonial bacteria) must fragment into smaller parts. Fragmentation modes in nature range from binary fission in bacteria to collective-level fragmentation and the production of unicellular propagules in multicellular organisms. Despite this apparent ubiquity, the...

19. Phase transitions in evolutionary dynamics

Alvaró Lozano Rojo

06/09/2018, 14:00

The evolutionary dynamics of a finite population where resident individuals are replaced by invader or mutant ones depend on its spatial structure. The population adopts the form of an undirected graph where the place occupied by each individual is represented by a node and it is bidirectionally linked to the places that can be occupied by its clonal offspring. There are undirected graph...

20. Strong amplifiers of selection

Josef Tkadlec

06/09/2018, 14:20

In evolutionary graph theory, population of size $n$ is represented as a (connected) graph with $n$ vertices whose edges represent who can replace whom. Initially, all $n$ vertices have fitness 1 except for one vertex (mutant) that has fitness $r>1$. This initial mutant may have arised either spontaneously (aka uniform initialization), or during reproduction (aka temperature initialization)....

13. Keynote: Darwinian evolution in spatial models of cancer

Bartlomiej Waclaw

06/09/2018, 15:10

Mathematical modelling of cancer has a long history but it traditionally focused on replicating growth laws observed for different tumours, the role of angiogenesis, or predicting the outcome of chemotherapy. Recently, advances in genomics have made it possible to investigate Darwinian evolution in populations of cancer cells. This has opened up many
interesting questions. In particular, as...

14. Modeling cancer: growth and size distribution of metastases under treatment

Pirmin Schlicke

06/09/2018, 15:55

The observation and ability to form prognosis for the amount and sizes of possible metastases of a tumor is of high interest for oncologists. Mathematical models describing the seeding and growth of metastases are possibly of clinical use in optimizing individual therapy algorithms.
I adapted the well-known von-Foerster equation used by Iwata, Kawasaki and Shigesada (2000) to describe...

15. Characterising the evolutionary modes of cancer and normal tissue

Robert Noble

06/09/2018, 16:15

The nature of evolution within normal and neoplastic tissue is a subject of debate. I will present a highly flexible computational model that allows evolutionary dynamics resulting from diverse spatial structures to be compared in a single, minimal framework. Combining stochastic simulations with mathematical analysis, I will explain how tissue architecture governs the potential for subclonal...

21. Keynote

Oana Carja

07/09/2018, 09:00

22. Vacancies in a growing habitat and the evolution of cooperation

Hyejin Park

07/09/2018, 09:45

We consider a stochastic evolutionary game on a one-dimensional lattice with vacancies created by fitness-dependent death processes. Interactions between neighbors are mimicked by a prisoner’s dilemma game and an individual with higher payoff lives longer. In each time step, we choose a random site of the habitat. If the site is occupied, its inhabitant dies with probability depending its game...

24. Keynote: Promising perspectives on age-structured mortality data

Annette Baudisch

07/09/2018, 10:30

Nature shapes patterns of birth and death for all living beings, including humans. Why does nature permit human lifespan to double from about 40 to 80, with progress still ongoing? What are the limits? Will we be in good health or not when old? How much can we influence, what is given? Life hides its secrets well under complex and endless variation – simple models and concepts provide helpful...

25. Life cycle of cooperation

Yuanxiao Gao

07/09/2018, 11:15

Evolutionary game theory provides a powerful and flexible tool to the investigation of the evolution of interacting individuals. In this study we focus on the evolution of “staying together” groups, in which new individuals in a population emerge only by splitting the previous group. These groups deserve a special attention, since many multicellular organisms use this mode of the organism...

26. Applying evolutionary demographic theory to evolution on graphs

Stefano Giaimo

07/09/2018, 11:35

Population structure can strongly affect evolutionary dynamics. A popular way to describe such structures are graphs. A quantity of great interest in the study of evolutionary graphs is the probability that a novel beneficial mutation spreads through the entire population. Here, we propose an alternative way to understand the forces driving fixation by viewing graphs as life cycles. Adapting...

27. Farewell

07/09/2018, 11:55

23. Race, ethnicity, and ancestry from a U.S. perspective: Important distinctions in structured population analysis

Alice Popejoy

Concepts that are culturally-defined such as "race", "ethnicity", and "ancestry" are often controversial and ambiguous, creating challenges for scientific research. Although these terms may have different meanings and connotations based on cultural, socio-political, and scientific frames of reference, there is a need for harmonization of their definitions and use in biomedical research and...