A geometric speed limit for acceleration by natural selection in evolutionary processes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new geometric speed limit for evolutionary processes, separating the effects of selection and mutation, and providing a tighter bound on the rate of change of observables in population dynamics.

Contribution

It derives a novel selection bound that can be tighter than the Cramér--Rao bound, especially when selection dominates mutation, with geometric interpretation and experimental implications.

Findings

The selection bound can be significantly tighter than traditional bounds.

The tightness depends on the correlation between the observable and growth rate.

Numerical simulations confirm the effectiveness of the bound in transient dynamics.

Abstract

We derived a new speed limit in population dynamics, which is a fundamental limit on the evolutionary rate. By splitting the contributions of selection and mutation to the evolutionary rate, we obtained the new bound on the speed of arbitrary observables, named the selection bound, that can be tighter than the conventional Cram\'{e}r--Rao bound. Remarkably, the selection bound can be much tighter if the contribution of selection is more dominant than that of mutation. This tightness can be geometrically characterized by the correlation between the observable of interest and the growth rate. We also numerically illustrate the effectiveness of the selection bound in the transient dynamics of evolutionary processes and discuss how to test our speed limit experimentally.