Why does invasion imply substitution? Beyond the paradigm of invasion fitness.

Abstract

Adaptive dynamics combines deterministic population dynamics of groups having different trait values and random process describing mutation and tries to predict the course of evolution of a species of interest. One of basic interests is to know which group survives, residents or mutants. By using invasion fitness as the primary tool, "invasion implies substitution" principle, IIS principle for short, has been established under the existence of a generating function in the sense of Brown and Vincent (Theor Popul Biol 31(1):140-166, 1987) and Vincent and Brown (Evolutionary game theory, natural selection, and darwinian dynamics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005). This principle essentially says that the local gradient of invasion fitness ultimately determines the outcome of the competition. However, as we will see in this paper, even if a system is within the scope of IIS principle, its neighborhood always contains systems which are beyond this scope. In this paper, in order to overcome such a limitation, we establish a wider class of systems which is still reasonable as a model of evolution of a species. For our wider class, the notion of raw invasion fitness is introduced. In terms of raw invasion fitness, an explicit criterion for the existence of generating function and a counterpart of IIS principle are obtained. This enables us to discuss small perturbations of a system within or without the scope of generating functions/IIS principle. Eventually, we understand why invasion implies substitution, i.e. why the method using invasion fitness works well with the existence of generating function, from our broader point of view.