Shifting balance theory Shifting balance theory The shifting balance theory is a theory of evolution proposed in 1932 by Sewall Wright, suggesting that adaptive evolution may proceed most quickly when a population divides into subpopulations with restricted gene flow. The name of the theory is borrowed from Wright's metaphor of fitness landscapes (evolutionary landscapes), attempting to explain how a population may move across an adaptive valley to a higher adaptive peak. According to the theory, this movement occurs in three steps: Although shifting balance theory has been influential in evolutionary biology, inspiring the theories of quantum evolution and punctuated equilibrium, little empirical evidence
Evolutionary graph theory Evolutionary graph theory Evolutionary graph theory is an area of research lying at the intersection of graph theory, probability theory, and mathematical biology. Evolutionary graph theory is an approach to studying how topology affects evolution of a population. That the underlying topology can substantially affect the results of the evolutionary process is seen most clearly in a paper by Erez Lieberman, Christoph Hauert and Martin Nowak. In evolutionary graph theory, individuals occupy vertices of a weighted directed graph and the weight w of an edge from vertex "i" to vertex "j" denotes the probability of "i" replacing "j". The weight