Figure 5

Evolution on different rugged landscapes ( r = 1). For each of the three population sizes, we simulated 100 different evolutionary walks for each of 50 different fitness landscapes. At the end of every simulation, we recorded the fitness of the most abundant clone. The black squares show those simulations for which the final fitness of this clone for the smaller population exceeds the fitness of this clone for the larger population, as indicated on top of each plot. The bottom right panel shows the fraction of simulations for which the medium populations reach higher fitness than the large populations. The average fraction of M >L, S >M and S >L over all 50 landscapes are 0.218(0.019), 0.038(0.003) and 0.003(0.001), values in parentheses indicate the standard error.