title: Adaptive walks and extreme value theory.
abstract: We study biological evolution in a high-dimensional genotype space in the regime of rare mutations and strong selection. The population performs an uphill walk which terminates at local fitness maxima. Assigning fitness randomly to genotypes, we show that the mean walk length is logarithmic in the number of initially available beneficial mutations, with a prefactor determined by the tail of the fitness distribution. This result is derived analytically in a simplified setting where the mutational neighborhood is fixed during the adaptive process, and confirmed by numerical simulations.
authors: Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne, 50937 Köln, Germany.
authors: Johannes
authors: J
authors: Neidhart
authors: Joachim
authors: J
authors: Krug
mesh_terms: D000220:Adaptation, Biological / Q000235:genetics; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005838:Genotype; D008954:Models, Biological; D009154:Mutation; D011336:Probability