Should evolutionary geneticists worry about higher-order epistasis?

Population ageing: what should we worry about?

Approximately half the world's population now has replacement-level fertility or below. The UK experience in accommodating to a changing dependency ratio provides some generalizable insights. A mechanistic approach assuming a fixed retirement age and a need to raise fertility or increase immigration in order to maintain pensions at a fixed proportion of the gross domestic product (GDP) is overs...

Should Designers Worry about Market Systems ?

Engineering approaches for optimizing designs within a market context generally take the perspective of a single producer, asking what design and price point will maximize producer profit predicted by consumer choice simulations. These approaches treat competitors and retailers as fixed or nonexistent, and they take business-oriented details, such as the structure of distribution channels, as s...

Should Judges Worry About the “CSI Effect”?

Identifying the importance of higher order epistasis

Higher order epistasis and fitness peaks

We show that higher order epistasis has a substantial impact on evolutionary dynamics by analyzing peaks in the fitness landscapes. There are 193,270,310 fitness graphs, or cube orientations, for 4-locus systems, distributed on 511, 863 isomorphism classes. We identify all fitness graphs with 6 or more peaks. 81 percent of them imply 4-way epistasis, whereas 9 percent of all 4-locus fitness gra...