Effect of Feedback between Environment and Finite Population

TL;DR

This paper investigates how feedback between species and environment influences evolutionary dynamics, revealing that both positive and negative feedback can unexpectedly favor less fit species and highlight the role of early stochastic events.

Contribution

It introduces a co-evolutionary model to analyze the effects of species-environment feedback on evolutionary outcomes, emphasizing the importance of early random events.

Findings

Positive feedback can hinder invasion success by benefiting many individuals.

Negative feedback can aid invasion by disadvantaging many individuals.

Feedback mechanisms can allow less fit species to dominate early on.

Abstract

Natural selection imply that any organisms including human being will evolve to improve its fitness advantage and the selected genotype or phenotype in equilibrium state will not vary over the time. However, evolutionary process of biological organisms in reality is greatly affected by the environmental change and historical accidents. In this research, we construct a co-evolutionary system to investigate the impact of species-environment feedback. When we talk about an invasion species or mutation, positive feedback is detrimental to the success of the invasion because positive feedback benefits a large number of individuals, whereas negative feedback benefits the invasion because negative feedback disadvantages a large number of individuals. In the case of a competition between two species with initially equal numbers of individuals, both positive and negative feedback will favor the species with low fitness, increasing its chances of taking over the whole population. The reason for this is that feedback allows initially inferior species to have greater fitness than initially dominating species in the early stages, emphasizing the importance of early random accident. Our findings emphasize the significance of the evolutionary path driven by species-environment feedback.