Natural populations are often exposed to temporally varying environments. Evolutionary dynamics in varying environments have been extensively studied, although understanding the effects of varying selection pressures remains challenging. Here, we investigate how cycling between a pair of statistically related fitness landscapes affects the evolved fitness of an asexually reproducing population. We construct pairs of fitness landscapes that share global fitness features but are correlated with one another in a tunable way, resulting in landscape pairs with specific correlations. We find that switching between these landscape pairs, depending on the ruggedness of the landscape and the interlandscape correlation, can either increase or decrease steady‐state fitness relative to evolution in single environments. In addition, we show that switching between rugged landscapes often selects for increased fitness in both landscapes, even in situations where the landscapes themselves are anticorrelated. We demonstrate that positively correlated landscapes often possess a shared maximum in both landscapes that allows the population to step through sub‐optimal local fitness maxima that often trap single landscape evolution trajectories. Finally, we demonstrate that switching between anticorrelated paired landscapes leads to ergodic‐like dynamics where each genotype is populated with nonzero probability, dramatically lowering the steady‐state fitness in comparison to single landscape evolution.

中文翻译：

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具有可调景观间相关性的交替环境中的进化

自然种群经常暴露于随时间变化的环境中。尽管了解不同选择压力的影响仍然具有挑战性，但不同环境中的进化动力学已被广泛研究。在这里，我们研究了一对统计相关的适应度景观之间的循环如何影响无性繁殖种群的进化适应度。我们构建了共享全局适应度特征但以可调节的方式彼此相关的适应度景观对，从而产生具有特定相关性的景观对。我们发现，根据景观的崎岖程度和景观间的相关性，这些景观对之间的切换可以增加或减少相对于单一环境中的进化的稳态适应性。此外，我们表明，崎岖景观之间的切换通常会选择增加两种景观的适应性，即使在景观本身反相关的情况下也是如此。我们证明，正相关的景观通常在两个景观中具有共同的最大值，这使得种群能够跨越次优的局部适应度最大值，而该最大值通常会陷入单一的景观演化轨迹。最后，我们证明，反相关配对景观之间的切换会导致遍历式动态，其中每个基因型都以非零概率填充，与单一景观演化相比，大大降低了稳态适应度。