How the architecture of hyperastronomically large genotype spaces shapes evolutionary dynamics

Understanding how genotypes map onto phenotypes, fitness, and eventually organisms is arguably the next major missing piece needed to update evolutionary theory. Though we are still far from achieving a complete picture of these relationships, our current understanding of simpler questions, such as the structure induced in the space of genotypes by sequences mapped to molecular structures (the so-called genotype-phenotype map), has revealed important facts that deeply affect the dynamical description of evolutionary processes. We will present computational and theoretical advances towards characterizing the networked structure of genotype spaces, briefly describe some dynamical implications for sequence populations, and present related empirical results.

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