Evolutionary Formalism for Products of Positive Random Matrices

Abstract

We present a formalism to investigate directionality principles in evolution theory for populations, the dynamics of which can be described by a positive matrix cocycle (product of random positive matrices). For the latter, we establish a random version of the Perron-Frobenius theory which extends all known results and enables us to characterize the equilibrium state of a corresponding abstract symbolic dynamical system by an extremal principle. We develop a thermodynamic formalism for random dynamical systems, and in this framework prove that the top Lyapunov exponent is an analytic function of the generator of the cocycle. On this basis a fluctuation theory for products of positive random matrices can be developed which leads to an inequality in dynamical entropy that can be interpreted as a directionality principle for the mutation and selection process in evolutionary dynamics.