We are proud to invite you to the Skoltech Colloquium!

Guest Speaker: Yaroslav Ispolatov, Researcher – University of British Columbia, Department of Physics of the Faculty of science of the University of Santiago of Chile.

When: March 6; 4:00pm.

Where: Institute of Gene Biology RAS, Vavilova street 34/5, Conference room, 1st floor.

What: Chaos and unpredictability in evolution.

Abstract: Half a century ago, the discovery of deterministic chaos has revolutionized science. Surprisingly, few of these insights have entered the realm of evolutionary biology, where “survival of the fittest” epitomizes evolution as an optimization process that generally converges to equilibrium, the optimal phenotype. This perspective may be correct if only a simple phenotype, such as body size, had affected the selection, but in reality, all organisms have a multitude of phenotypic properties that impinge on their birth and death rates, and hence on evolutionary dynamics. However, evolution in high-dimensional phenotype spaces has rarely been considered. Using the recently developed mathematical framework of adaptive dynamics we investigate the long-term evolutionary dynamics in simple single-spcecies competition models with high-dimensional phenotype spaces. Our main conclusion is that evolution is generally chaotic when distinct phenotypic features affect the ecological interactions, such as competition for resources and predation, in complicated, non-additive way. These ecological interactions generate a evolutionary feedback loop, because selection pressure, which causes evolutionary change, changes itself as a population’s phenotype distribution evolves. Our conclusion supports Gould’s famous postulate, Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay”: if evolution is fundamentally chaotic, then evolution is generally unpredictable in the long term, even if the selection that drives it is deterministic. We also provide insights and estimates of how the probability of chaos in a generally dissipative dynamic systems depends on its dimensionality.

Transfers:

Shuttle bus Hypercube → Institute of Gene Biology RAS at 3:10 pm

Shuttle bus MSM (Karacorum) → Institute of Gene Biology RAS at 3:20 pm

How to get to Institute of Gene Biology RAS:

Address: Vavilova street 34/5 (ул. Вавилова 34/5)

Map: http://www.genebiology.ru/institute/way.shtml

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If you like to participate and for further information or questions, please Liliya Abaimova
We look forward to seeing you.