Mutation Size Optimizes Speciation in an Evolutionary Model
Nathan D. Dees, Sonya Bahar*
Department of Physics and Astronomy and Center for Neurodynamics, University of Missouri at St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America
Abstract
The role of mutation rate in optimizing key features of evolutionary dynamics has recently been investigated in various computational models. Here, we address the related question of how maximum mutation size affects the formation of species in a simple computational evolutionary model. We find that the number of species is maximized for intermediate values of a mutation size parameter μ; the result is observed for evolving organisms on a randomly changing landscape as well as in a version of the model where negative feedback exists between the local population size and the fitness provided by the landscape. The same result is observed for various distributions of mutation values within the limits set by μ. When organisms with various values of μ compete against each other, those with intermediate μ values are found to survive. The surviving values of μ from these competition simulations, however, do not necessarily coincide with the values that maximize the number of species. These results suggest that various complex factors are involved in determining optimal mutation parameters for any population, and may also suggest approaches for building a computational bridge between the (micro) dynamics of mutations at the level of individual organisms and (macro) evolutionary dynamics at the species level.
Citation: Dees ND, Bahar S (2010) Mutation Size Optimizes Speciation in an Evolutionary Model. PLoS ONE 5(8): e11952. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011952
Editor: Daniel J. Rankin, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Received: January 26, 2010; Accepted: June 29, 2010; Published: August 3, 2010
Copyright: © 2010 Dees, Bahar. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: bahars@umsl.edu
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