Related papers: Expected Anomalies in the Fossil Record
Phylogenetic analyses which include fossils or molecular sequences that are sampled through time require models that allow one sample to be a direct ancestor of another sample. As previously available phylogenetic inference tools assume…
The theory of evolution states that the diversity of species can be explained by descent with modification. Therefore, all living beings are related through a common ancestor. This evolutionary process must have left traces in our molecular…
Statistically consistent estimation of phylogenetic trees or gene trees is possible if pairwise sequence dissimilarities can be converted to a set of distances that are proportional to the true evolutionary distances. Susko et al. (2004)…
Lateral transfer, a process whereby species exchange evolutionary traits through non-ancestral relationships, is a frequent source of model misspecification in phylogenetic inference. Lateral transfer obscures the phylogenetic signal in the…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Topological defects are common in many everyday systems. In general, they appear if a symmetry is broken at a rapid phase transition. In this article, I explain why it is believed that they should have also been formed in the early universe…
We provide a simple formulation of the conditions under which ecological bias should be expected and argue that the bias will affect any method of ecological inference; our claim is supported by formal derivations and several examples where…
According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…
Species sampling processes have long served as the fundamental framework for modeling random discrete distributions and exchangeable sequences. However, data arising from distinct but related sources require a broader notion of…
1. Theoretical models pertaining to feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes are prevalent in multiple biological fields. An integrative overview is currently lacking, due to little crosstalk between the fields and the use of…
A vast array of transformative technologies developed over the past decade has enabled measurement and perturbation at ever increasing scale, yet our understanding of many systems remains limited by experimental capacity. Overcoming this…
Statistical physics can describe the behavior of microbial populations consisting of many heterogeneous individuals. A direct consequence is the existence of phase transitions, where the behavior of a population changes discontinuously upon…
The recent availability of larger typological databases such as Haspelmath et al. (2005) has brought the linguistics community closer to having a solid, empirical foundation for making actual claims about prehistoric migrations, deep…
An early burst of speciation followed by a subsequent slowdown in the rate of diversification is commonly inferred from molecular phylogenies. This pattern is consistent with some verbal theory of ecological opportunity and adaptive…
Statistical inference in observational science typically relies on a fundamental assumption: as sample size increases and uncertainties decrease, the inferred results should converge to the true physical quantities. This assumption…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
The recently discovered correspondence between the distribution of rapidity gaps in electron-nucleus diffractive processes and the statistics of the height of genealogical trees in branching random walks is reviewed. In addition, a new…
Cycles in population dynamics are widely found in nature. These cycles are understood as emerging from the interaction between two or more coupled species. Here, we argue that data regarding population dynamics are prone to…
The disks around Herbig Ae/Be stars are commonly divided into group I and group II based on their far-infrared spectral energy distribution, and the common interpretation for that is flared and flat disks. Recent observations suggest that…
Mixed microbial communities, usually composed of various bacterial and fungal species, are fundamental in a plethora of environments, from soil to human gut and skin. Their evolution is a paradigmatic example of intertwined dynamics, where…