Two level natural selection with a quasi-stationarity approach

Abstract

In a view for a simple model where natural selection at the individual level is confronted to selection effects at the group level, we consider some individual-based models of some large population subdivided into a large number of groups. We then obtain the convergence to the law of a stochastic process with some Feynman-Kac penalization. To analyze the limiting behavior of this law, we exploit a recent approach, designed for the convergence to quasi-stationary distributions. We are able to deal with the fixation of the stochastic process and relate the convergence to equilibrium to the one where fixation implies extinction. We notably establish different regimes of convergence. Besides the case of an exponential rate (the rate being uniform over the initial condition), critical regimes with convergence in 1/t are also to notice. We finally address the relevance of such limiting behaviors to predict the long-time behavior of the individual-based model and describe more specifically the cases of weak selection. Consequences in term of evolutive dynamics are also derived, where such competition is assumed to occur repeatedly at each de novo mutation.