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One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…
Jim Shapiro synthesizes a great many observations about the mechanisms of evolution to reach the remarkable conclusion that large-scale modification, exchange, and rearrangement of the genome are common and should be viewed as fundamental…
The evolution of cognition is frequently discussed as the evolution of cognitive abilities or the evolution of some neuronal structures in the brain. However, since such traits or abilities are often highly complex, understanding their…
Recombination is introduced into Eigen's theory of quasispecies evolution. Comparing numerical simulations of the rate equations in the non-recombining and recombining cases show that recombination has a strong effect on the error threshold…
Historical sciences like evolutionary biology reconstruct past events by using the traces that the past has bequeathed to the present. The Markov Chain Convergence Theorem and the Data Processing Inequality describe how the mutual…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…
Phylogenetic trees describe the relationships between species in the evolutionary process, and provide information about the rates of diversification. To understand the mechanisms behind macroevolution, we consider a class of multitype…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Baldwinian and Lamarckian evolution have existed for a long time in evolutionary algorithms (EAs) without ever dominating the academic literature or practical applications. In this work, we use modern empirical and theoretical methods to…
Consider a population of $N$ individuals, each of them carrying a type in $\mathbb N_0$. The population evolves according to a Moran dynamics with selection and mutation, where an individual of type $k$ has the same selective advantage over…
Migration between different habitats is ubiquitous among biological populations. In this Letter, we study a simple quasispecies model for evolution in two different habitats, with different fitness landscapes, coupled through one-way…
What is motivation and how does it work? Where do goals come from and how do they vary within and between species and individuals? Why do we prefer some things over others? MEDO is a theoretical framework for understanding these questions…
In subdivided populations, migration acts together with selection and genetic drift and determines their evolution. Building up on a recently proposed method, which hinges on the emergence of a time scale separation between local and global…
Growing efforts to measure fitness landscapes in molecular and microbial systems are premised on a tight relationship between landscape topography and evolutionary trajectories. This relationship, however, is far from being straightforward:…
One of the main properties of biological systems is modularity, which manifests itself at all levels of their organization, starting with the level of molecular genetics, ending with the level of whole organisms and their communities. In a…
Evolution by natural selection, which is one of the most compelling themes of modern science, brought forth evolutionary algorithms and evolutionary computation, applying mechanisms of evolution in nature to various problems solved by…
We discuss stochastic dynamics of populations of individuals playing games. Our models possess two evolutionarily stable strategies: an efficient one, where a population is in a state with the maximal payoff (fitness) and a risk-dominant…
To learn about the past from a sample of genomic sequences, one needs to understand how evolutionary processes shape genetic diversity. Most population genetic inference is based on frameworks assuming adaptive evolution is rare. But if…
We examine a model of biological evolution of Eigen's quasispecies in a holey fitness landscape, where the fitness of a site is either 0 (lethal site) or a uniform positive constant (viable site). So, the evolution dynamics is determined by…