Understanding the evolution of complex biological processes involving
many genes and proteins poses problems similar to those encountered in
statistical physics, where methods have been developed to describe
phenomena emerging from a large number of interacting entities. I will
discuss how ideas from statistical physics can be applied to the
evolutionary dynamics of such ‘many gene problems’. Whereas
the evolution of plants and animals took hundreds of millions of years,
viruses can change significantly over a few years, the ‘swine
flu’ outbreak this spring providing a recent example. While the
rapid evolution of viruses is a threat to human health, it provides us
with the unique opportunity to study the general features of evolution,
either through planned experiments or analyzing how the viral genomes
change over the years. Of particular interest is the role of
recombination, a form of viral sex in which different viruses mix their
genes. Recombination produces new individuals from existing genetic
variation, which is believed to speed up evolution and in the case of
viruses can give rise to more virulent strains of flu or drug resistant
strains of HIV. However, the quantitative effects of recombination on
evolution are rather poorly understood, in particular when many genes
are involved. I will discuss how sex speeds up evolution and how the
interplay between reshuffling of genetic variation during sexual
reproduction and interaction between genes can give rise to
qualitatively different regimes of evolutionary dynamics.
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