Frequency-dependent fitness induces multistability in coevolutionary dynamics
Hinrich Arnoldt, Marc Timme, and Stefan Grosskinsky (2012)
J. Royal Society Interface 77:3387. ( BibTeX export )
Evolution is simultaneously driven by a number of processes such as mutation, competition
and random sampling. Understanding which of these processes is dominating the collective
evolutionary dynamics in dependence on system properties is a fundamental aim of theoretical
research. Recent works quantitatively studied co-evolutionary dynamics of competing
species with a focus on linearly frequency-dependent interactions, derived from a game theoretic
viewpoint. However, several aspects of evolutionary dynamics, e.g. limited
resources, may induce effectively nonlinear frequency dependencies. Here we study the
impact of nonlinear frequency dependence on evolutionary dynamics in a model class that
covers linear frequency dependence as a special case. We focus on the simplest non-trivial setting
of two genotypes and analyse the co-action of nonlinear frequency dependence with
asymmetric mutation rates. We find that their co-action may induce novel metastable
states as well as stochastic switching dynamics between them. Our results reveal how the
different mechanisms of mutation, selection and genetic drift contribute to the dynamics
and the emergence of metastable states, suggesting that multi-stability is a generic feature
in systems with frequency-dependent fitness.
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