Related papers: Expected Anomalies in the Fossil Record

The cosmic Middle Ages, spanning the last 8-10 Gyr of the Universe, is a critical period in which massive early-formed systems coexist with global star formation quenching in less massive galaxies, yet galaxies experience further dynamical,…

The controversy concerning both the definition of the species and methods for inferring the boundaries and numbers of species has occupied biologists for centuries, and the debate itself has become known as the species problem. The modern…

We use elementary variational arguments to prove, and improve on, gap estimates which arise in simulating quantum circuits by adiabatic evolution.

Current evolutionary biology models usually assume that a phenotype undergoes gradual change. This is in stark contrast to biological intuition, which indicates that change can also be punctuated-the phenotype can jump. Such a jump could…

Using the Attouch-Th\'era duality, we study the cycles, gap vectors and fixed point sets of compositions of proximal mappings. Sufficient conditions are given for the existence of cycles and gap vectors. A primal-dual framework provides an…

Species interactions (ranging from direct predator prey relationships to indirect effects mediated by the environment) are central to ecosystem balance and biodiversity. While empirical methods for measuring these interactions exist, their…

We investigate evolutionary dynamics related to periodicity fossil biodiversity. Coherent periodic fluctuation in origination/extinction of marine genera that survive <45 million years is the source of an observed ~62 million year…

We review common situations in Bayesian latent variable models where the prior distribution that a researcher specifies differs from the prior distribution used during estimation. These situations can arise from the positive definite…

There are multiple factors which can cause the phylogenetic inference process to produce two or more conflicting hypotheses of the evolutionary history of a set X of biological entities. That is: phylogenetic trees with the same set of leaf…

Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…

In most circumstances, probability sampling is the only way to ensure unbiased inference about population quantities where a complete census is not possible. As we enter the era of 'big data', however, nonprobability samples, whose sampling…

Transients are fundamental to ecological systems with significant implications to management, conservation, and biological control. We uncover a type of transient synchronization behavior in spatial ecological networks whose local dynamics…

Before we apply nonlinear techniques, for example those inspired by chaos theory, to dynamical phenomena occurring in nature, it is necessary to first ask if the use of such advanced techniques is justified "by the data". While many…

The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…

Evolution algebras are non-associative algebras inspired from biological phenomena, with applications to or connections with different mathematical fields. There are two natural ways to define an evolution algebra associated to a given…

Using the shape space of codons and tRNAs we give a physical description of the genetic code evolution on the basis of the codon capture and ambiguous intermediate scenarios in a consistent manner. In the lowest dimensional version of our…

Multi-type birth-death processes underlie approaches for inferring evolutionary dynamics from phylogenetic trees across biological scales, ranging from deep-time species macroevolution to rapid viral evolution and somatic cellular…

Spatial patterns in the early fruit fly embryo emerge from a network of interactions among transcription factors, the gap genes, driven by maternal inputs. Such networks can exhibit many qualitatively different behaviors, separated by…

A feature common to many models of vegetation pattern formation in semi-arid ecosystems is a sequence of qualitatively different patterned states, "gaps -> labyrinth -> spots", that occurs as a parameter representing precipitation…

We prove special cases of a general conjecture: If an invertible field theory admits a projectively topological boundary theory, then it has finite order in the abelian group of invertible field theories. One can substitute `gapped' for…