An Epochal Debate

The Statistical Dynamics of Epochal Evolution

An Age-Old Debate

Copyright © 2008 American Heart Association. All rights reserved. Print ISSN: 0194-911X. Online 72514 Hypertension is published by the American Heart Association. 7272 Greenville Avenue, Dallas, TX DOI: 10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.107.105742 2008;51;952-959; originally published online Feb 7, 2008; Hypertension Megan Coylewright, Jane F. Reckelhoff and Pamela Ouyang Menopause and Hypertension: An A...

Debate Debate

Geocomputation is an emerging field of research that advocates the use of computationally intensive techniques such as neural networks, heuristic search, and cellular automata for spatial data analysis. Since increasing amounts of health-related data are collected within a geographical frame of reference, geocomputational methods show increasing potential for health data analysis. This paper pr...

Optimizing Epochal Evolutionary Search: Population-Size Independent Theory

Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in population fitness are punctuated by sudden innovations, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We use a recent quantitative mathematical analysis of epochal evolution to estimate, as a function of population size and mutation rate, the average number of fitness function evaluations to reach the global opt...

Influenza A Gradual and Epochal Evolution: Insights from Simple Models

The recurrence of influenza A epidemics has originally been explained by a "continuous antigenic drift" scenario. Recently, it has been shown that if genetic drift is gradual, the evolution of influenza A main antigen, the haemagglutinin, is punctuated. As a consequence, it has been suggested that influenza A dynamics at the population level should be approximated by a serial model. Here, simpl...