Quasi-Species in High Dimensional Spaces

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that in high-dimensional sequence spaces, the fitness of quasi-species becomes largely independent of mutational probabilities and initial conditions due to measure concentration phenomena, indicating robustness in evolutionary dynamics.

Contribution

It establishes that high-dimensional quasi-species exhibit universal fitness values regardless of mutational and initial condition variations, extending the understanding of evolutionary robustness.

Findings

Fitness becomes independent of mutational probabilities

Fitness is robust to initial frequency distributions

Results extend to any Lipschitz function of constituent frequencies

Abstract

We show that, under certain assumptions, the fitness of almost all quasi-species becomes independent of mutational probabilities and the initial frequency distributions of the sequences in high dimensional sequence spaces. This result is the consequence of the concentration of measure on a high dimensional hypersphere and its extension to Lipschitz functions knows as the Levy's Lemma. Therefore, evolutionary dynamics almost always yields the same value for fitness of the quasi-species, independent of the mutational process and initial conditions, and is quite robust to mutational changes and fluctuations in initial conditions. Our results naturally extend to any Lipschitz function whose input parameters are the frequencies of individual constituents of the quasi-species. This suggests that the functional capabilities of high dimensional quasi-species are robust to fluctuations in the mutational probabilities and initial conditions.