Related papers: Expected Anomalies in the Fossil Record
A simple way to model phenotypic evolution is to assume that after splitting, the trait values of the sister species diverge as independent Brownian motions. Relying only on a prior distribution for the underlying species tree (conditioned…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
Adiabatic evolutions with a gap condition have, under a range of circumstances, exponentially small tails that describe the leaking out of the spectral subspace. Adiabatic evolutions without a gap condition do not seem to have this feature…
The rich and varied ways that genetic material can be passed between species has motivated extensive research into the theory of phylogenetic networks. Features that align with biological processes, or with desirable mathematical…
Population structure can be modelled by evolutionary graphs, which can have a substantial, but very subtle influence on the fate of the arising mutants. Individuals are located on the nodes of these graphs, competing with each other to…
There is a general consensus among archaeologists that replacement of Neanderthals by anatomically modern humans in Europe occurred around 40K to 35K YBP. However, the causal mechanism for this replacement continues to be debated. Searching…
Identifying undocumented or potential future interactions among species is a challenge facing modern ecologists. Recent link prediction methods rely on trait data, however large species interaction databases are typically sparse and…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
In a deterministic or random tree, a notion of ancestral diversity can be defined as follows. Sample independently $n$ groups of $k$ leaves and count the number $N_n(k)$ of distinct most recent common ancestors of each of the groups. As $n$…
We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…
The provision of intergenerational care, via the Grandmother Hypothesis, has been implicated in the evolution of post-fertile longevity, particularly in humans. However, if grandmothering does provide fitness benefits, a key question is why…
In 2016 Lemke Oliver and Soundararajan examined the gaps between the first hundred million primes and observed biases in their distributions modulo 10. Given our work on the evolution of the populations of various gaps across stages of…
By providing a framework of accounting for the shared ancestry inherent to all life, phylogenetics is becoming the statistical foundation of biology. The importance of model choice continues to grow as phylogenetic models continue to…
The inference of new information on the relatedness of species by phylogenetic trees based on DNA data is one of the main challenges of modern biology. But despite all technological advances, DNA sequencing is still a time-consuming and…
Gene gains and losses have shaped the gene repertoire of species since the universal last common ancestor to species today. Genes in extant species were gained at different historical times via de novo creation of new genes, duplication of…
The Earth's climate has experienced numerous critical transitions during its history, which have often been accompanied by massive and rapid changes in the biosphere. Such transitions are evidenced in various proxy records covering…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
Estimating phylogenetic trees is an important problem in evolutionary biology, environmental policy and medicine. Although trees are estimated, their uncertainties are discarded by mathematicians working in tree space. Here we explicitly…
The purpose of this roadmap article is to draw attention to a paradigm shift in our understanding of evolution towards a perspective of ecological-evolutionary feedback, highlighted through two recent highly simplified examples of rapid…
A fundamental issue discussed in evolutionary biology is the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms. Here we develop non-robust models provided in [1] and attempt to get robust models investigated how differentiation of…