Evolutionary dynamics on strongly correlated fitness landscapes

Abstract

We study the evolutionary dynamics of a maladapted population of self-replicating sequences on strongly correlated fitness landscapes. Each sequence is assumed to be composed of blocks of equal length and its fitness is given by a linear combination of four independent block fitnesses. A mutation affects the fitness contribution of a single block leaving the other blocks unchanged and hence inducing correlations between the parent and mutant fitness. On such strongly correlated fitness landscapes, we calculate the dynamical properties like the number of jumps in the most populated sequence and the temporal distribution of the last jump which is shown to exhibit a inverse square dependence as in evolution on uncorrelated fitness landscapes. We also obtain exact results for the distribution of records and extremes for correlated random variables.