Evolutionary Dynamics: a Stochastic Thermodynamics perspective

A conventional view of evolutionary dynamics is based on three essential elements: (i) organism reproduction with imperfect heredity; (ii) variations, including mutations, which are typically introduced by the reproduction process; (iii) selection, which acts within a population and allows some variant species to survive and reproduce while eliminating others. These elements shape the “evolutionary forces” that characterize the evolutionary dynamics. In this presentation, we introduce a general model of reproduction–variation–selection dynamics. By treating these dynamics as stochastic thermodynamic processes, we make precise the notion of the forces that characterize evolution. One of these forces, in particular, can make organism reproduction insensitive (robust) to variations. We finally show how some of the detailed predictions of our model are compatible with laboratory experiments of viral evolution.