Eur. Phys. J. B 31, 379-384 (2003)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2003-00045-3

Selective advantage of topological disorder in biological evolution

¹ Institute of Physics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Na Slovance 2, 18221 Praha, Czech Republic
² Institute of Physics of Charles University in Prague, Ke Karlovu 5, 12116 Praha, Czech Republic

Corresponding author: ^a slanina@fzu.cz

Received: 9 August 2002
Revised: 7 November 2002
Published online: 14 February 2003

Abstract

We examine a model of biological evolution of Eigen's quasispecies in a so-called holey fitness landscape, where the fitness of a site is either 0 (lethal site) or a uniform positive constant (viable site). The evolution dynamics is therefore determined by the topology of the genome space which is modelled by the random Bethe lattice. We use the effective medium and single-defect approximations to find the criteria under which the localized quasispecies cloud is created. We find that shorter genomes, which are more robust to random mutations than average, represent a selective advantage which we call “topological”. A way of assessing empirically the relative importance of reproductive success and topological advantage is suggested.