Epigenetic variation can promote adaptation by smoothing rugged fitness landscapes

Heritable non-genetic phenotypic variation-broadly, epigenetics can potentially influence evolutionary outcomes as direct targets of selection or through interactions with genetic variation. While their evolutionary benefits in generating phenotypic diversity in changing environments are well-characterized, there has been relatively little consideration of how the joint influence of epigenetic changes and mutations would affect traversal of multi-peak adaptive landscapes. Here, we discover general principles for how epigenetics, by generating an epigenetic quasispecies (clusters of semi-stable phenotypes mapped to a single genotype), tends to improve adaptive outcomes of an asexual population on rugged fitness landscapes even in a constant environment. In particular, rapid epigenetic changes tend to smooth out suboptimal fitness peaks through incorporating fitness contributions of epimutations, allowing access to better adaptive outcomes. Remarkably, the average impact of epigenetics is..., , # Epigenetic variation can promote adaptation by smoothing rugged fitness landscapes

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.wdbrv162z](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wdbrv162z)

## Description of the data and file structure

This repository contains code and data for the manuscript titled \"Epigenetic variation can promote adaptation by smoothing rugged fitness landscapes\", published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2025.2619

The central tenet of this work is analyzing how epigenetic switching affects adaptation on fitness landscapes. This analysis has two critical aspects - \
First. generating landscapes which vary significantly in their ruggedness. We use two approaches to do this: \
1\. Creating correlated fitness landscapes with a tunable degree of epistasis. The script to do this is \"CreatingLandscapes_Main.R\"\
2\. Creating uncorrelated fitness landscapes following the house of cards (HoC) model. The  script to do this is -  \"CreatingLandscapes_HoC.R\"

The focus of thi...,