We cast some classes of fitness landscapes as problems in spectral analysis on various Cayley graphs. In particular, landscapes derived from RNA folding are realized on Hamming graphs and analyzed in terms of Walsh transforms; assignment problems are interpreted as functions on the symmetric...

In this paper we prove a Faber-Krahn-type inequality for regular trees and give a complete characterization of extremal trees. The main tools are rearrangements and perturbation of regular trees.

Fitness landscapes are an important concept in molecular evolution since evolutionary adaptation as well as {\it in vitro} selection of biomolecules can be viewed as a hill-climbing-like process. Global features of landscapes can be described by statistical measures such as correlation functions...