Evolutionary Invasion Analysis - Introduction and Background

Introduction and Background

The basic principle of evolution via natural selection, survival of the fittest, was outlined by the naturalist Charles Darwin in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species. Though controversial at the time, the central ideas remain virtually unchanged to this date, even though much more is now known about the biological basis of inheritance. Darwin expressed his arguments verbally, but many attempts have since then been made to formalise the theory of evolution. The perhaps most well known are population genetics which aim to model the biological basis of inheritance but usually at the expense of ecological detail, quantitative genetics which incorporates quantitative traits influenced by genes at many loci and evolutionary game theory which ignores genetic detail but incorporates a high degree of ecological realism, in particular that the success of any given strategy depends on the frequency at which strategies are played in the population, a concept known as frequency dependence.

Adaptive Dynamics is a set of techniques developed during the 1990s for understanding the long-term consequences of small mutations in the traits expressing the phenotype. They link population dynamics to evolutionary dynamics and incorporate and generalise the fundamental idea of frequency dependent selection from game theory. The number of papers using Adaptive Dynamics techniques is increasing steadily as Adaptive Dynamics is gaining ground as a versatile tool for evolutionary modelling.