Ponto de vista: por uma fundação mecanicista (nascimento-morte) da teoria da evolução

sexta-feira, março 10, 2017

Point of view: Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory

Michael Doebeli Yaroslav Ispolatov Burt Simon

University of British Columbia, Canada; Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Chile; University of Colorado, United States


Published February 15, 2017

Cite as eLife 2017;6:e23804



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.


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