Related papers: Expected Anomalies in the Fossil Record
The two major approaches to studying macroevolution in deep time are the fossil record and reconstructed relationships among extant taxa from molecular data. Results based on one approach sometimes conflict with those based on the other,…
Species trees represent the historical divergences of populations or species, while gene trees trace the ancestry of individual gene copies sampled within those populations. In cases involving rapid speciation, gene trees with topologies…
Recent advances have allowed for both morphological fossil evidence and molecular sequences to be integrated into a single combined inference of divergence dates under the rule of Bayesian probability. In particular the fossilized…
A prevailing viewpoint in palaeoclimate science is that a single palaeoclimate record contains insufficient information to discriminate between most competing explanatory models. Results we present here suggest the contrary. Using SMC^2…
We review the formation and evolution of fossil groups and clusters from both the theoretical and the observational points of view. In the optical band, these systems are dominated by the light of the central galaxy. They were interpreted…
The magnitude and variability of Earth's biodiversity have puzzled scientists ever since paleontologic fossil databases became available. We identify and study a model of interdependent species where both endogenous and exogenous impacts…
When long-lived, balancing selection can lead to trans-species polymorphisms that are shared by two or more species identical by descent. In this case, the gene genealogies at the selected sites cluster by allele instead of by species and,…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
Phylogenetic mixtures model the inhomogeneous molecular evolution commonly observed in data. The performance of phylogenetic reconstruction methods where the underlying data is generated by a mixture model has stimulated considerable recent…
For taxonomic levels higher than species, the abundance distributions of number of subtaxa per taxon tend to approximate power laws, but often show strong deviationns from such a law. Previously, these deviations were attributed to…
Using data drawn from large-scale databases, a number of interesting trends in the fossil record have been observed in recent years. These include the average decline in extinction rates throughout the Phanerozoic, the average increase in…
In Chapter 1 we fully characterise pairs of finite graphs which form a gap in the full homomorphism order. This leads to a simple proof of the existence of generalised duality pairs. We also discuss how such results can be carried to…
Mathematical models are increasingly being used to understand complex biochemical systems, to analyze experimental data and make predictions about unobserved quantities. However, we rarely know how robust our conclusions are with respect to…
The spread of infectious disease in a human community or the proliferation of fake news on social media can be modeled as a randomly growing tree-shaped graph. The history of the random growth process is often unobserved but contains…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
We use a combination of analytic models and computer simulations to gain insight into the dynamics of evolution. Our results suggest that certain interesting phenomena should eventually emerge from the fossil record. For example, there…
We consider the diffusion-advection problem in two simple cellular flow models (often invoked as examples for subdiffusive tracer's motion) and concentrate on the intermediate time range, in which the tracer's motion indeed may show…
Interval analysis, when applied to the so called problem of experimental data fitting, appears to be still in its infancy. Sometimes, partly because of the unrivaled reliability of interval methods, we do not obtain any results at all.…
It is important to be clear as to whether a theory such as evolutionary archaeology pertains to biological evolution, in which acquired change is obliterated at the end of each generation, or cultural change, in which acquired change is…
We introduce a new model for large scale evolution and extinction in which species are organized into food chains. The system evolves by two processes: origination/speciation and extinction. In the model, extinction of a given species can…