Related papers: Expected Anomalies in the Fossil Record

One of the longstanding debates in the history of paleontology focuses on the issue of whether or not there have been long term cycles (operating over tens of millions of years) in biodiversity and extinction. Here we consider the history…

The genetic diversity of a species is shaped by its recent evolutionary history and can be used to infer demographic events or selective sweeps. Most inference methods are based on the null hypothesis that natural selection is a weak or…

The use of historical estimates in current studies is common in a wide variety of application areas. Nevertheless, despite their routine use the uncertainty associated with historical estimates is rarely properly accounted for in the…

Phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary relationships between organisms. One of the main challenges in the field is to take biological data for a group of organisms and to infer an evolutionary tree, a graph that represents these…

Background: Continuous traits evolution of a group of taxa that are correlated through a phylogenetic tree is commonly modelled using parametric stochastic differential equations to represent deterministic change of trait through time,…

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…

The incubation period of a disease is the time between an initiating pathologic event and the onset of symptoms. For typhoid fever, polio, measles, leukemia and many other diseases, the incubation period is highly variable. Some affected…

For a branching process in random environment it is assumed that the offspring distribution of the individuals varies in a random fashion, independently from one generation to the other. For the subcritical regime a kind of phase transition…

A generic saddle-node bifurcation is proposed to modelize fast transitions of finite amplitude arising in geophysical (and perhaps other) contexts, when they result from the intrinsic dynamics of the system. The fast transition is…

Recent methods have been developed to map single-cell lineage statistics to population growth. Because population growth selects for exponentially rare phenotypes, these methods inherently depend on sampling large deviations from finite…

We study evolving genealogies, i.e. processes that take values in the space of (marked) ultra-metric measure spaces and satisfy some sort of "consistency" condition. This condition is based on the observation that the genealogical distance…

Brown dwarfs, which straddle the mass range between stars and planets, appear to be common both in the solar neighborhood and in star-forming regions. Their ubiquity makes the question of their origin an important one both for our…

The concept of intermediate tail dependence is useful if one wants to quantify the degree of positive dependence in the tails when there is no strong evidence of presence of the usual tail dependence. We first review existing studies on…

Recently, several methods have leveraged deep generative modeling to produce example-based explanations of image classifiers. Despite producing visually stunning results, these methods are largely disconnected from classical explainability…

We consider the evolution of domain walls produced during an anisotropic phase in the very early universe, showing that the resulting network can be very anisotropic. If the domain walls are produced during an inflationary era, the network…

Neutral evolution assumes that there are no selective forces distinguishing different variants in a population. Despite this striking assumption, many recent studies have sought to assess whether neutrality can provide a good description of…

We study the gaps between consecutive prime numbers directly through Eratosthenes sieve. Using elementary methods, we identify a recursive relation for these gaps and for specific sequences of consecutive gaps, known as constellations.…

Inferring causal effects on long-term outcomes using short-term surrogates is crucial to rapid innovation. However, even when treatments are randomized and surrogates fully mediate their effect on outcomes, it's possible that we get the…

Comparative and evolutive ecologists are interested in the distribution of quantitative traits among related species. The classical framework for these distributions consists of a random process running along the branches of a phylogenetic…

Increasingly better observations of resolved protoplanetary disks show a wide range of conditions in which planets can be formed. Many transitional disks show gaps in their radial density structure, which are usually interpreted as…