Abstract
The present work addresses how seasonal environmental changes affect adaptation and evolutionary predictability in the presence of epistasis for finite-size populations. We assume gene regulation so that different seasons of the environment inflict selective pressures on different set traits each time. The existence of epistasis reduces modularity, and the subsets no longer evolve independently. We show that epistasis enhances oscillation in fitness despite decreased variation at the genotypic level, as revealed by an entropy analysis. Furthermore, the amplitude of oscillations increases with the period of the different phases. We also observe that demography plays a role, and larger populations are associated with larger oscillations and more efficient searches of local optima.
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