Molecular Evolution in timedependent Environments

Abstract. The quasispecies theory is studied for dynamic replication landscapes. A meaningful asymptotic quasispecies is defined for periodic time dependencies. The quasispecies ’ composition is constantly changing over the oscillation period. The error threshold moves towards the position of the time averaged landscape for high oscillation frequencies and follows the landscape closely for low oscillation frequencies. The quasispecies theory, put forward by Eigen in 1971 [1], and subsequently studied by Eigen, Schuster, McCaskill and coworkers [2, 3, 4], is nowadays one of the classical theories of self-replicating entities. Its prediction of an error threshold, above which the self-replication ceases to produce useful offspring, has important implications for the origin of life. The error threshold effectively limits the amount of information the entities can carry, thus placing an upper bound on the complexity self-reproducing information carriers can achieve without sophisticated error correction mechanisms. Although completely static environments are unrealistic in any case apar