Papers › Evolutionary adaptation is facilitated by the presence of lethal genotypes
Evolutionary adaptation is facilitated by the presence of lethal genotypes
Viktoria Blavatska, Bartlomiej Waclaw
The adaptation rate in theoretical models of biological evolution increases with the mutation rate but only to a point when mutations into lethal states cause extinction. One would expect that removing such states should be beneficial for evolution. We show here that, counter-intuitively, lethal mutations speed up adaptation on rugged fitness landscapes with many fitness maxima and minima, if strong competition for resources exist. We consider a modified stochastic version of the quasispecies model with two types of genotypes, viable and lethal, and show that increasing the rate of lethal mutations decreases the time to evolve the best-fit genotype. This can be explained by an increased rate of crossing fitness valleys, facilitated by reduced selection against less-fit variants.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections