Population bottleneck

Physics

Intuition

Pathology

Sociology

Attractor

Cognitive science

Disease

Population

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Mathematics

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Evolutionary biology

Biology

Gene

Statistical physics

Demography

Mathematical analysis

Evolutionary dynamics

Fixation (population genetics)

Embedded system

Econometrics

Allele

Psychology

Population size

Computer science

Bottleneck

Genetics

Microsatellite

Medicine

By abruptly changing the size and composition of a population, bottlenecks can dramatically alter evolutionary trajectories. In the traditional picture, the faster a population recovers from a bottleneck, the more rapidly finite-size intrinsic fluctuations are suppressed and therefore the greater the likelihood of fixation to the attractor within whose basin the bottleneck constrained the population, initially. We now argue that this intuition is misleading; demonstrating that precisely the opposite behaviour is also possible. Depending critically on the rate of mutation, increased population growth can drive fixation to attractors that are <i>different</i> to that from whose basin it started. These findings are explained in terms of statistically distinct regimes of demographic behaviour, drawing parallels with the notion of non-equilibrium phase transitions. Such dynamical demographic phases are delimited by sharp transitions in time, as a population grows, and ultimately result from a time-dependent antagonism between mutation and the stochastically-induced effects of frequency-dependent birth.

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