Evolution dynamics in terraced NK landscapes

Abstract

We study populations of agents evolving in fitness landscapes constructed according to the rules of a modified NK model with a tunable amount of neutral paths. In the `punctuated equilibrium' regime evolutionary events are identified as jumps in the mean population fitness, and the statistics of these jumps in an ensemble of independently evolving populations is analyzed. We show that, for a wide range of landscapes parameters, the number of events in time t is Poisson distributed, with the time parameter replaced by the logarithm of time. This simple log-Poisson statistics likewise describes the number n of records in any sequence of t independently generated random numbers. The implications of this behavior for evolution dynamics are discussed.