Baldwin effect under multipeaked fitness landscapes: Phenotypic fluctuation accelerates evolutionary rate

Abstract

Phenotypic fluctuations and plasticity can generally affect the course of evolution, a process known as the Baldwin effect. Several studies have recast this effect and claimed that phenotypic plasticity accelerates evolutionary rate (the Baldwin expediting effect); however, the validity of this claim is still controversial. In this study, we investigate the evolutionary population dynamics of a quantitative genetic model under a multipeaked fitness landscape, in order to evaluate the validity of the effect. We provide analytical expressions for the evolutionary rate and average population fitness. Our results indicate that under a multipeaked fitness landscape, phenotypic fluctuation always accelerates evolutionary rate, but it decreases the average fitness. As an extreme case of the trade-off between the rate of evolution and average fitness, phenotypic fluctuation is shown to accelerate the error catastrophe, in which a population fails to sustain a high-fitness peak. In the context of our findings, we discuss the role of phenotypic plasticity in adaptive evolution.