Speaker
Prof.
Michael Lässig
(University of Cologne)
Description
Evolution is a quest for innovation: organisms adapt to
changing natural selection by evolving new phenotypes. At
the molecular level, adaptive evolution takes place in a sea
of stochasticity generated by random new mutations and
fluctuations in reproduction. The irreversibility of
adaptive evolution can be measured by a quantity called
fitness flux. This talk addresses the statistical foundation
of molecular evolution, which is provided by a fitness flux
theorem. The theorem shows that evolutionary dynamics and
modern nonequilibrium thermodynamics obey strikingly
analogous statistical principles. We discuss how fitness
flux can be measured, using genomic data of the human
influenza virus.
Primary author
Prof.
Michael Lässig
(University of Cologne)
