Population aging through survival of the fit and stable

Abstract

Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates. Individuals reproduce and die with a rate that is a property of each state, not necessarily related to its stability, and the offspring is born on the parent's state. The total population is limited by resources or space, as for example in a chemostat or a Petri dish. Our aim is to show that mutation rate and fitness become more correlated, \emph{even if they are completely uncorrelated for an isolated individual}, underlining the fact that the interaction induced by limitation of resources is by itself efficient for generating collective effects.