title: Speeding up Evolutionary Search by Small Fitness Fluctuations.
abstract: We consider a fixed size population that undergoes an evolutionary adaptation in the weak mutation rate limit, which we model as a biased Langevin process in the genotype space. We show analytically and numerically that, if the fitness landscape has a small highly epistatic (rough) and time-varying component, then the population genotype exhibits a high effective diffusion in the genotype space and is able to escape local fitness minima with a large probability. We argue that our principal finding that even very small time-dependent fluctuations of fitness can substantially speed up evolution is valid for a wide class of models.
authors: Department of Physics, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA  jotwinowski@physics.emory.edu.
authors: Jakub
authors: J
authors: Otwinowski
authors: Sorin
authors: S
authors: Tanase-Nicola
authors: Ilya
authors: I
authors: Nemenman