Reply to: Evolutionary rescue effect can disappear under non-neutral mutations—a reply to Zhang et al. (2022).

The document is a reply to a comment by Hinsch et al. on a paper published in Nature Communications in October 2022. The comment raises concerns about the assumptions and results of the original paper, focusing on the impact of negative drift on mutation-driven phases in evolutionary dynamics. The authors address these concerns by discussing the flexibility of their modeling framework and presenting numerical tests to show that the mutation-driven phase is not as sensitive to negative drift as suggested. They also highlight the differences between additive and multiplicative fitness changes in evolutionary processes. The authors suggest a follow-up study to further explore the impact of deleterious mutations on pathogen spread. [Extracted from the article]