Evolutionary branching in distorted trait spaces

Abstract

Biological communities are thought to have been evolving in trait spaces that are not only multi-dimensional, but also distorted in a sense that mutational covariance matrices among traits depend on the parental phenotypes of mutants. Such a distortion may affect diversifying evolution as well as directional evolution. In adaptive dynamics theory, diversifying evolution through ecological interaction is called evolutionary branching. This study analytically develops conditions for evolutionary branching in distorted trait spaces of arbitrary dimensions, by a local nonlinear coordinate transformation so that the mutational covariance matrix becomes locally constant in the neighborhood of a focal point. The developed evolutionary branching conditions can be affected by the distortion when mutational step sizes have significant magnitude difference among directions, i.e., the eigenvalues of the mutational covariance matrix have significant magnitude difference.