Adaptive walks on time-dependent fitness landscapes

Abstract

The idea of adaptive walks on fitness landscapes as a means of studying evolutionary processes on large time scales is extended to fitness landscapes that are slowly changing over time. The influence of ruggedness and of the amount of static fitness contributions are investigated for model landscapes derived from Kauffman's $NK$ landscapes. Depending on the amount of static fitness contributions in the landscape, the evolutionary dynamics can be divided into a percolating and a non-percolating phase. In the percolating phase, the walker performs a random walk over the regions of the landscape with high fitness.