Fitness landscapes past, present, and future – Andreas Wagner – University of Zurich

Abstract

The fitness landscape or adaptive landscape is an iconic metaphor of evolutionary biology that has also been influential in unrelated areas of science, such as psychology and operations research. I present a brief history of the concept in biology, and discuss how early theory predicts that landscapes with many peaks – rugged landscapes – can impair Darwinian evolution (and similar optimization processes in other areas of science). I then discuss our most recent experiments to map such a landscape in the bacterium E. coli at a large scale. These experiments seemingly invalidate early theoretical predictions about ruggedness and adaptive evolution. I discuss possible reasons for this mismatch between theory and experiment. More generally, recent research suggests that landscapes are more than just superficial metaphors but deep analogies with multiple unanticipated uses. They raise a number of questions that may be of potential interest to historians and philosophers.

Short Biosketch

Andreas Wagner received his Ph.D. in 1995 at Yale University, where his research won the J.S. Nicholas Prize for best dissertation in the field. He is currently a professor in the department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute for the study of complex systems (Santa Fe, NM). Wagner leads a laboratory of more than a dozen international researchers in evolutionary biology and complex systems studies.  He has (co)authored more than 250 scientific papers in journals that include Nature, Science, and PNAS. Wagner is also the author of six books. The most recent of them is Sleeping Beauties (OneWorld) a Times and Telegraph book of the year 2023. Wagner has held research fellowships at several institutions, such as the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin (Germany), the Institut des Hautes Etudes in Bures-sur-Yvette (France), and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS, South Africa). He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and an elected Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). Wagner has served on the editorial boards of multiple scientific journals that include Scientific Advances, Genome Biology, and Bioessays. In recent years, invited lectures have taken him to destinations that include Chile, Taiwan, Norway, Spain, India, and Singapore, as well as numerous cities in Switzerland, France, Germany, the UK, and the U.S.An Austrian-born U.S. citizen, Wagner lives in Zurich, Switzerland.