Evolutionary landscape

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In evolutionary theory, an evolutionary landscape (or fitness landscape) refers to an imaginary multidimensional parameter space that organisms (or arguably, individual cells or even whole clades) occupy. The ordinate (or 'y') axis is usually taken to be fitness of the entity in question; if the landscape may be described as 'flat' if most changes in the immediate mutational neighbourhood are of negligible effect on fitness. This (rare) situation is interpreted to mean that the organism in question is not under any form of selection. On the other hand, an organism that is well or poorly adapted can be thought of as inhabiting a local peak or trough respectively.

Evolutionary landscapes provide a useful cognitive tool for visualising the consequences of evolution on entities of a system, commonly in the form of fitness landscapes; however actual visualisation of real organisms' fitness landscapes is fraught with difficulties; not least due to the problems inherent in visualising a many dimensions at once.