Natural Selection in the Wake of Catastrophe

Living organisms, from bacteria to humans, are more likely to survive if their traits enhance fitness. In populations well adapted to their environmental niches, natural selection proceeds via rarely beneficial mutations. But when a catastrophe wipes out niche diversity, sudden adaptation often follows. Here, we present a data-validated theory of natural selection in the wake of catastrophe and unveil a simple law that emerges during recovery: the mean fitness relaxes inversely with time, with a prefactor proportional to the number of traits coupled to the post-catastrophe environment. We put our approach to test using experimental fitness landscapes measured following antibiotic administration to E. coli . The resulting mean trait adaptation is not described by gradient ascent on a fitness landscape, instead it follows an algorithm known as Levenberg–Marquardt optimization. Near fitness peaks, evolutionary trajectories are biased against greediness — from an optimization perspective, post-catastrophic selection is optimistic.