Fitness Landscapes, Adaptation and Sex on the Hypercube

The focus of this thesis is on the theoretical treatment of fitness landscapes in the context of evolutionary processes. Fitness landscapes connect an organism's genome to its fitness. They are an important tool of theoretical evolutionary biology and in the recent years also experimental results became available. In this thesis, several models of fitness landscapes are analyzed with different analytical and numerical methods. The goal is to identify characteristics in order to compare the model landscapes to experimental measurements. Furthermore, different adaptive processes are examined. On the one hand such which run with mutations under selection, especially adaptive walks. On the other hand such which include recombination. Since these are non-linear in time development, an analytical approach is hindered which leads to an increasing use of computer simulations.

Statistical physics

adaptive walks

correlated random variables

evolutionary biology

extreme value theory

fitness landscapes

spin glasses