Evolutionary Tradeoffs

Evolutionary Tradeoffs

In biological systems, traits are often linked in ways that prevent simultaneous optimization of all of them. The resulting ‘evolutionary tradeoffs’ reflect necessary compromises among the functions of multiple traits. Such compromises are particularly clear when energy must be allocated among competing metabolic functions. Energy allocated to growth is not available for reproduction, immune fu...

Diametrical diseases reflect evolutionary-genetic tradeoffs

Tradeoffs centrally mediate the expression of human adaptations. We propose that tradeoffs also influence the prevalence and forms of human maladaptation manifest in disease. By this logic, increased risk for one set of diseases commonly engenders decreased risk for another, diametric, set of diseases. We describe evidence for such diametric sets of diseases from epidemiological, genetic and mo...

Evolutionary tradeoffs and the structure of allelic polymorphisms

Evolutionary Tradeoffs between Economy and Effectiveness in Biological Homeostasis Systems

Biological regulatory systems face a fundamental tradeoff: they must be effective but at the same time also economical. For example, regulatory systems that are designed to repair damage must be effective in reducing damage, but economical in not making too many repair proteins because making excessive proteins carries a fitness cost to the cell, called protein burden. In order to see how biolo...

Exploring tradeoffs in pleiotropy and redundancy using evolutionary computing

Evolutionary computation algorithms are increasingly being used to solve optimization problems as they have many advantages over traditional optimization algorithms. In this paper we use evolutionary computation to study the trade-off between pleiotropy and redundancy in a client-server based network. Pleiotropy is a term used to describe components that perform multiple tasks, while redundancy...