Natural selection as coarsening

TL;DR

This paper proposes that natural selection can be understood as a coarsening process, linking evolutionary dynamics with statistical physics phenomena like domain growth and ripening, enabling new analytical tools and insights.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analogy between natural selection and coarsening phenomena, offering a new perspective and mathematical framework for evolutionary theory.

Findings

Natural selection exhibits scaling and self-similarity akin to coarsening.

The analogy provides a new exactly soluble model for evolutionary dynamics.

It bridges concepts from statistical physics and evolutionary biology.

Abstract

Analogies between evolutionary dynamics and statistical mechanics, such as Fisher's second-law-like "fundamental theorem of natural selection" and Wright's "fitness landscapes", have had a deep and fruitful influence on the development of evolutionary theory. Here I discuss a new conceptual link between evolution and statistical physics. I argue that natural selection can be viewed as a coarsening phenomenon, similar to the growth of domain size in quenched magnets or to Ostwald ripening in alloys and emulsions. In particular, I show that the most remarkable features of coarsening---scaling and self-similarity---have strict equivalents in evolutionary dynamics. This analogy has three main virtues: it brings a set of well-developed mathematical tools to bear on evolutionary dynamics; it suggests new problems in theoretical evolution; and it provides coarsening physics with a new exactly soluble model.