Evolutionary invasion analysis

Evolutionary invasion analysis, also known as adaptive dynamics, is a set of techniques for studying long-term phenotypical evolution developed during the 1990s. It incorporates the concept of frequency dependence from game theory but allows for more realistic ecological descriptions, as the traits vary continuously and gives rise to a non-linear invasion fitness (the classical fitness concept is not directly applicable to situations with frequency dependence).

The basic principle of evolution via natural selection was outlined by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species. Though controversial at the time, the central ideas remain largely unchanged to this date, even though much more is now known about the biological basis of inheritance. Darwin expressed his arguments verbally, but many attempts have since then been made to formalise the theory of evolution. The best known are population genetics which models inheritance at the expense of ecological detail, quantitative genetics which incorporates quantitative traits influenced by genes at many loci, and evolutionary game theory which ignores genetic detail but incorporates a high degree of ecological realism, in particular that the success of any given strategy depends on the frequency at which strategies are played in the population, a concept known as frequency dependence.

Adaptive dynamics is a set of techniques developed during the 1990s for understanding the long-term consequences of small mutations in the traits expressing the phenotype. They link population dynamics to evolutionary dynamics and incorporate and generalise the fundamental idea of frequency-dependent selection from game theory.

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