ArticleeLife2017
Towards a mechanistic foundation of evolutionary theory.
Article in eLife, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed.
- Why there are so many definitions of fitness in models.Genetics · 2026Review
- Coexistence rules for small, antagonistically interacting microbial communities.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
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- An evolutionary game theory for event-driven ecological population dynamics.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2025Article
- Cooperative environmental engineering via biofilm formation can stabilize consumer-resource systems.PloS one · 2025Article
- Frequency-dependent returns in nonlinear public goods games.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Emergence and maintenance of stable coexistence during a long-term multicellular evolution experiment.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Putting theory to the test: An integrated computational/experimental chemostat model of the tragedy of the commons.PloS one · 2024Article
- Extinction scenarios in evolutionary processes: a multinomial Wright-Fisher approach.Journal of mathematical biology · 2023Article
- Ghosts of the past: Elemental composition, biosynthesis reactions and thermodynamic properties of Zeta P.2, Eta B.1.525, Theta P.3, Kappa B.1.617.1, Iota B.1.526, Lambda C.37 and Mu B.1.621 variants of SARS-CoV-2.Microbial risk analysis · 2023Article
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- Stochasticity directs adaptive evolution toward nonequilibrium evolutionary attractors.Ecology · 2023Article
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- A general calculus of fitness landscapes finds genes under selection in cancers.Genome research · 2022Article
- Evolution of innate behavioral strategies through competitive population dynamics.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Nine things to keep in mind about mathematical modelling in ecology and evolution.Journal of biosciences · 2022Article
- Modeling host-associating microbes under selection.The ISME journal · 2021Article
- Intriguing effects of selection intensity on the evolution of prosocial behaviors.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most evolutionary thinking is based on the notion of fitness and related ideas such as fitness landscapes and evolutionary optima. Nevertheless, it is often unclear what fitness actually is, and its meaning often depends on the context. Here we argue that fitness should not be a basal ingredient in verbal or mathematical descriptions of evolution. Instead, we propose that evolutionary birth-death processes, in which individuals give birth and die at ever-changing rates, should be the basis of evolutionary theory, because such processes capture the fundamental events that generate evolutionary dynamics. In evolutionary birth-death processes, fitness is at best a derived quantity, and owing to the potential complexity of such processes, there is no guarantee that there is a simple scalar, such as fitness, that would describe long-term evolutionary outcomes. We discuss how evolutionary birth-death processes can provide useful perspectives on a number of central issues in evolution.
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