Abstract
We live in an ever changing biosphere that faces continuous and often stressing environmental challenges. From this perspective, much effort is currently devoted to understanding how natural populations succeed or fail in adapting to evolving conditions. In a different context, many complex dynamical systems experience critical transitions where their dynamical behaviour or internal structure changes suddenly. Here we connect both approaches and show that in rough and correlated fitness landscapes, population dynamics shows flickering under small stochastic environmental changes, alerting of the existence of tipping points. Our analytical and numerical results demonstrate that transitions at the genomic level preceded by early-warning signals are a generic phenomenon in constant and slowly driven landscapes affected by even slight stochasticity. As these genomic shifts are approached, the time to reach mutation-selection equilibrium dramatically increases, leading to the appearance of hysteresis in the composition of the population. Eventually, environmental changes significantly faster than the typical adaptation time may result in population extinction. Our work points out several indicators that are at reach with current technologies to anticipate these sudden and largely unavoidable transitions.
Highlights
Tipping points and early warning signals in the genomic composition of populations induced by environmental changes
Our analytical and numerical results demonstrate that transitions at the genomic level preceded by early-warning signals are a generic phenomenon in constant and slowly driven landscapes affected by even slight stochasticity
We prove analytically and characterize numerically that sharp transitions at the genomic level preceded by early-warning signals are a generic phenomenon in constant and slowly driven landscapes affected by even slight stochasticity, and focus on the robustness of the phenomenon described
Summary
Tipping points and early warning signals in the genomic composition of populations induced by environmental changes. Our analytical and numerical results demonstrate that transitions at the genomic level preceded by early-warning signals are a generic phenomenon in constant and slowly driven landscapes affected by even slight stochasticity As these genomic shifts are approached, the time to reach mutation-selection equilibrium dramatically increases, leading to the appearance of hysteresis in the composition of the population. Several models have interpreted those www.nature.com/scientificreports transitions as jumps along evolutionary optimization, with stasis periods due to entropic or fitness barriers that the population has difficulty in overcoming[13,14,15], or as selective sweeps leading to a new phenotype[12] We analyse these transitions in realistic, slowly changing fitness landscapes of genomes, and show that it is a generic phenomenon. We pay special attention to the mathematical description of the population dynamics over the fitness landscape, and the relevant quantities that characterize it
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