Talk:Fitness landscape

Economics connection

It's also been suggested that adaptive landscapes could be useful in economics, though I'm unaware of any academic articles pointing to such conclusions. A professor of mine simply stated that some economists are now suggesting that "initial conditions and path dependency" are driving factors of the development of an economy, which ties into the notion that there are many local peaks instead of the current (he called it "myopic") view of a global economy with only one peak. I'll try to search for something to back this up before I include it in the article. Until then, discuss? I think it could definitely add to the article. Rkitko 12:47, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, landscapes are simply a useful illustrative tool. Also see epigenetic landscape (not sure if it exists yet, otherwise see C. H. Waddington). So I'd hope that your economic landscapes would carry a different name. I think you should make a new page if you find significant amounts of material, and put a "See also" link on Fitness landscape and vice versa. - Samsara _contrib ^talk 13:51, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. Actually, I got redirected here from searching for adaptive landscapes. An adaptive landscape is the tool, a fitness landscape is a type of adaptive landscape used in evolutionary biology. I'm sure I'm just breaking the tip of the iceburg here with uses of adaptive landscapes. Perhaps adaptive landscapes should be a disambiguation page with links to the specific uses like fitness landscape? My economics professor indicated that they indeed wouldn't be called "adaptive landscapes" in economics, but he was unsure as to what economic theory would call them. I'm still searching for something conclusive... Rkitko 22:18, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Here's one source, at least - http://www.worldscinet.com/acs/04/0401/S0219525901000139.html. I'm currently leafing through and verifying that this indeed is a peer-reviewed journal. Rkitko 22:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Credits

Credit for the connection of epistasis and the landscape shape, should not go to the reference of Beerenwinkel et al. The article of Beerenwinkel et al is only a minor contribution compared to the many papers on epistasis and fitness landscapes. If credit is due, give it to Kauffman. The article of Beerenwinkel et al by the way has not been peer reviewd yet.

A few points -

• Could you make the corrections yourself, since you appear to be the most well acquainted with the problem?
• Please put comments at the end of the page, with a title if its a new topic. I have done this for this topic.

PAR 19:06, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Descriptions

Although the characterisation of a fitness landscape in this article does seem to encompass every point it seems rather spread out. Wouldn't it be better to have the concept of a fitness landscape and how one works in the introductory paragraphs and then have two subheadings for evol. bio. and evo. optimisation?

Also what is the sub-heading 'Fitness landscapes in biology' doing there. I have added a paragraph on connectivity (which may need a small edit :-) ) in this section simply because it followed on from the material above. However, as far as I can see there is no particular biological theory that couldn't be included in the paragraphs above or below. Which returns me to my first point. Any thoughts? Or will anyone object if I jig it round? Kae1is 18:21, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

It seems like you have a better handle on the subject than anyone watching this page, so go for it. Just make sure you keep citing your sources and using the reference tags and footnotes when possible. If you need help with the technical side of Wikipedia, I'd be more than happy to help out where I can. Cheers, Rkitko 05:36, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Merge with fitness function

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was no consensus so no merge. It's been nearly two years. D O N D E groovily Talk to me 02:19, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

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Is there a fundamental difference with the fitness function, which also has a Wikipedia article? Should both be merged? I'll rather ask this here than add a Merge proposal on top of the fitness function-page. BertSeghers (talk) 22:11, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Well they both seem to be the same thing, so I think you should merge it. 129.67.38.36 (talk) 10:31, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Disagree, fitness landscape is a visualisation of a fitness function sure, but they're used for very different things. Fitness landscape is used as a thought experiment for analysing heuristics, while the fitness function is a part of those heuristics. As an example, it's pretty meaningless to talk of the importance of computational time in computing the fitness landscape, the whole point is that the entire fitness landscapes can't be feasibly computed. RichardTowers (talk) 12:58, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Merge with Evolutionary Landscape

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was consensus to merge This conversation took place on the Talk:Evolutionary_landscape Below is the conversation. As a result, the two pages will be merged under Evolutionary landscape. Wm chytrid (talk) 19:58, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

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It has been proposed to merge this article with fitness landscape. Fitness landscapes are one type of evolutionary landscapes, though many authors use the terms interchangably. If the two pages are merged, the fitness landscape page should be subsumed into the evolutionary landscape page. Chytrid Wm (talk) 16:03, 15 October 2013 (UTC) What exactly constitutes an "evolutionary landscape" is confused in the literature. The term evolutionary landscape is often used interchangeably with adaptive landscape and fitness landscape, though other authors distinguish between them. As discussed below, different authors have different definitions of adaptive and fitness landscapes. Additionally, there is large disagreement whether it should be used as a visual metaphor disconnected from the underlying math, a tool for evaluating models of evolution, or a model in and of itself used to generate hypotheses and predictions. Clearly, the field of biology, specifically evolutionary biology and population genetics, needs to come to a consensus of what an evolutionary landscape is and how it should be used. This clarification needs to happen before a decision on a merger can take place. (At least in my opinion) Chytrid Wm (talk) 18:02, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree with what you're saying Chytrid Wm, although I think it would be best to integrate the articles. The second paragraph of the current leader might even be a section in and of itself or included in the criticisms section. Additionally, some of the information is repeated anyway. It might also be good to get some more images. For example we could include a figure or two comparing the different types of axes used. I'd suggest basically the structure below. What do you reckon?T. Shafee (Evo&Evo) (talk) 10:32, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

• History
• Criticisms, caveats and limitations
• Fitness landscapes
• Other types of Evolutionary Landscapes
• Applications to Genomics
• References
• External links

Sounds good! About the images, I would need help. It was a bit of a fluke that I was able to generate the ones I did. Wm chytrid (talk) 20:17, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I could help out a bit with images. I wrote an Excel program to generate a range of acceptable looking landscapes. Do you want to do the merger and I'll make the images? T. Shafee (Evo&Evo) (talk) 07:53, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Sounds good! To be clear, this merger will consist of taking the contents of fitness landscapes and adding them to evolutionary landscapes. Correct? Wm chytrid (talk) 20:33, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that looks like the best way to do it.T. Shafee (Evo&Evo) (talk) 02:59, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

NK fitness landscape

The NK fitness landscape graphic depicts mutational paths jumping from peak to peak. This seems contrary to how evolution works, (small incremental changes). Surely these mutational paths would only make sense if the individual mutations of genes were very extreme (big jumps around the landscape). I feel like this needs clarification in the article. 92.24.63.92 (talk) 00:14, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

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Arrows?

The article contains a figure with the following caption: "Visualization of two dimensions of an NK fitness landscape. The arrows represent various mutational paths that the population could follow while evolving on the fitness landscape." However, the figure contains no arrows.165.225.38.226 (talk) 20:33, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion:

• SWAG Fitness Landscape.png

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 09:36, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

The Relationship between Fitness Landscapes and Optimisation Problems

The section on Evolutionary Optimisation currently states "In order to use evolutionary optimization, one has to define for every possible solution to the problem of interest (i.e., every possible route in the case of the delivery truck) how 'good' it is." This is simply false. If one is using, for example, tournament selection, all that is required is a partial order on the search space (otherwise, fields such as interactive evolutionary computation would be impossible). At least in EC, this supports the view that fitness landscapes form a useful metaphor, that fits some domains accurately enough to be used to analyse them, but for other domains (interactive EC, but also noisy or dynamic EC) are more a rough guide to intuition. Evolutionary biology is a bit outside my expertise, but I would be surprised if similar considerations didn't apply there. Urilarim (talk) 09:35, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

I have now made a correction to "In order to use evolutionary optimization, one has to define...", which is simply incorrect for a wide range of evolutionary optimisation algorithms. I understand that this may have been given simply to avoid complicating matters, but it is likely to lead to confusion for anyone starting to explore EC. Further down, I have tried briefly to explain why, in many cases, the concept of a fitness landscape can still be conceptually useful; but in others, is difficult to apply.

Addition of a Survival Threshold?

What happens if one includes a survival threshold with the fitness landscape? Let's say it's represented by a sea level that depends on environmental conditions. If the sea level is low under favorable evolutionary conditions there can be migration from one peak to another. If the sea level slowly rises as conditions become harsher the organism may end up restricted to a single island of the landscape. Eventually the organisms will be forced to the peak where the gene is optimized. If the sea level rises above the peak the population becomes extinct. On the other hand if conditions improve the population remains optimized but the higher survival rates will likely keep it near the peak. As conditions improve further and the population size increases variation may become more permissible which would again allow some migration from peak to peak under highly favorable condition. Would this explain punctuated evolution? --Jbergquist (talk) 05:52, 26 August 2019 (UTC)