Evolutionary Fitness in Variable Environments

TL;DR

This paper investigates how environmental fluctuations influence evolutionary fitness, showing that variability can enhance fitness and reduce fixation times, thereby affecting effective population size estimates.

Contribution

It provides analytical and microscopic models demonstrating the impact of environmental variability on fitness and evolutionary dynamics.

Findings

Environmental fluctuations increase fitness by reducing sensitivity.

Variability shortens fixation times even in neutral evolution.

Fluctuations help explain smaller effective population sizes.

Abstract

One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a general evolutionary model and by studying corresponding individual-based microscopic models. We demonstrate that not only larger growth rates and viabilities, but also reduced sensitivity to environmental variability substantially increases the fitness. Even for neutral evolution, variability in the growth rates plays the crucial role of strongly reducing the expected fixation times. Thereby, environmental fluctuations constitute a mechanism to account for the effective population sizes inferred from genetic data that often are much smaller than the census population size.