Survival phenotype, selfish individual versus Darwinian phenotype

Abstract

Consider and infinitely large asexual population without mutations and direct interactions. The activities of an individual determine the fecundity and the survival probability of individuals, moreover each activity takes time. We view this population model as a simple combination of life history and optimal foraging models. The phenotypes are given by probability distributions on these activities. We concentrate on the following phenotypes defined by optimization of different objective functions: selfish individual (maximizes the average offspring number during life span), survival phenotype (maximizes the probability of non-extinction of descendants) and Darwinian phenotype (maximizes the phenotypic growth rate). We find that the objective functions above can achieve their maximum at different activity distributions, in general. We find that the objective functions above can achieve their maximum at different activity distributions, in general. The novelty of our work is that we let natural selection act on the different objective functions. Using the classical Darwinian reasoning, we show that in our selection model the Darwinian phenotype outperforms all other phenotypes.

State-controlled epidemic in a game against a novel pathogen

“…As the probability of recovery ( ) and the mean time ( ) spent in given stage is different at different stages of the infection, we employ a general, time-dependent branching process (Crump–Mode–Jagers process) (cf. 29 , 30 ) to investigate the risk of new pathogen outbreaks in countries outside of the country of origin.…”