For simplicity, especially in the fitness landscape literature, fitness is often treated as a scalar — usually a real number. If our fitness landscape is on genotypes then each genotype has an associated scalar value of fitness. If our fitness landscape is on phenotypes then each phenotype has an associated scalar value of fitness. But this is a little strange. After all, two organisms with the same genotype or phenotype don’t necessarily have the same…

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As regular readers of TheEGG know, I’ve been interested in fitness landscapes for many years. At their most basic, a fitness landscape is an almost unworkably vague idea: it is just a mapping from some description of organisms (usually a string corresponding to a genotype or phenotype) to fitness, alongside some notion of locality — i.e. some descriptions being closer to each other than to some other descriptions. Usually, fitness landscapes are studied over combinatorially…

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It’s been a while since I’ve shared or discussed code on TheEGG. So to avoid always being too vague and theoretical, I want to use this post to explain how one would write some Python code to measure evolutionary games. This will be an annotated sketch of the game assay from our recent work on measuring evolutionary games in non-small cell lung cancer (Kaznatcheev et al., 2019). The motivation for this post came about a…

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As you can tell from browsing the mathematical oncology posts on TheEGG, somatic evolution is now recognized as a central force in the initiation, progression, treatment, and management of cancer. This has opened a new front in the proverbial war on cancer: focusing on the ecology and evolutionary biology of cancer. On this new front, we are starting to deploy new kinds of mathematical machinery like fitness landscapes and evolutionary games. Recently, together with Peter…

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Recently I was revisiting Xue et al. (2016) and Julian Xue’s thought on supply-driven evolution more generally. I’ve been fascinated by this work since Julian first told me about it. But only now did I realize the economic analogy that Julian is making. So I want to go through this Mutants as Economic Goods metaphor in a bit of detail. A sort of long-delayed follow up to my post on evolution as a risk-averse investor…

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For this week, I want to try a new type of post. A quick introduction to a standard topic that might not be familiar to all readers and that could be useful later on. The goal is to write a shorter post than usual and provide an launching point for future more details discussion on a topic. Let’s see if I can stick to 500 words — although this post is 933, so — in…

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With almost all of January behind us, I want to share the final summary of 2018. The first summary was on cancer and fitness landscapes; the second was on metamodeling. This third summary continues the philosophical trend of the second, but focuses on analyzing the roles of science, philosophy, and related concepts in society. There were only 10 posts on the societal aspects of science and philosophy in 2018, with one of them not on…

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Last Saturday, with just minutes to spare in the first calendar week of 2019, I shared a linkdex the ten (primarily) non-philosophical posts of 2018. It was focused on mathematical oncology and fitness landscapes. Now, as the second week runs into its final hour, it is time to start into the more philosophical content. Here are 18 posts from 2018 on metamodeling. With a nice number like 18, I feel obliged to divide them into…

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Happy 2019! As we leave 2018, the Theory, Evolution, and Games Group Blog enters its 9th calendar year. This past year started out slowly with only 4 posts in the first 5 months. However, after May 31st, I managed to maintain a regular posting schedule. This is the 32nd calendar week in a row with at least one new blog post released. I am very happy about this regularity. Let’s see if I can maintain…

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A biologist and a mathematician walk together into their joint office to find the rubbish bin on top of the desk and on fire. The biologist rushes out, grabs a fire extinguisher, puts out the blaze, returns the bin to the floor and they both start their workday. The next day, the same pair return to their office to find the rubbish bin in its correct place on the floor but again on fire. This…

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