Error Thresholds on Correlated Fitness

The evolution of molecular quasispecies on two diierent complex tness landscapes, the Sherrington Kirkpatrick spin glass and the Graph Bipartitioning landscape, is investigated in dependence on replication delity and population size. Three diierent regimes of replication delity are detected. At high copying delity one obtains a population with high mean tness localized around a time independent consensus sequence. For large mutation frequencies the population is spread over the entire sequence space and the average tness vanishes. In the intermediate regime the population is centered around a consensus sequence which moves in sequence space. Although the genetic information is lost over time, the population maintains an average tness signiicantly above zero. A theoretical approximation is derived for the error threshold as a function of the sequence length.