Related papers: Conditions for the Trivers-Willard hypothesis to b…
We consider a stochastic model of population dynamics where each individual is characterised by a trait in {0,1,...,L} and has a natural reproduction rate, a logistic death rate due to age or competition and a probability of mutation…
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…
The spatial structure of an evolving population affects which mutations become fixed. Some structures amplify selection, increasing the likelihood that beneficial mutations become fixed while deleterious mutations do not. Other structures…
In evolutionary games the fitness of individuals is not constant but depends on the relative abundance of the various strategies in the population. Here we study general games among n strategies in populations of large but finite size. We…
When polygenic traits are under stabilizing selection, many different combinations of alleles allow close adaptation to the optimum. If alleles have equal effects, all combinations that result in the same deviation from the optimum are…
When beneficial mutations are rare, they accumulate by a series of selective sweeps. But when they are common, many beneficial mutations will occur before any can fix, so there will be many different mutant lineages in the population…
The origin of altruistic behavior, i.e. the behavior that is useful for a population or a species but goes at the expense of an altruistic individual, has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with…
In many biological processes, the size of a population changes stochastically with time, and recent work in the context of cancer and bacterial growth have focused on the situation when the mean population size grows exponentially. Here,…
One of the key difficulties in using estimation-of-distribution algorithms is choosing the population size(s) appropriately: Too small values lead to genetic drift, which can cause enormous difficulties. In the regime with no genetic drift,…
A general approach to optimizing fast processes using a gender genetic algorithm is described. Its difference from the more traditional genetic algorithm it contains division the artificial population into two sexes. Male subpopulations…
We develop a linear one-sex dynamical model of human population reproduction through marriage. In our model, a woman may marry and divorce multiple times; however, only women who are currently married are assumed to bear children. The…
We present a stylized model with feedback loops for the evolution of a population's wealth over generations. Individuals have both talent and wealth: talent is a random variable distributed identically for everyone, but wealth is a random…
Evolutionary game theory is a mathematical approach to studying how social behaviors evolve. In many recent works, evolutionary competition between strategies is modeled as a stochastic process in a finite population. In this context, two…
An important -- but very demanding -- property in collective decision-making is strategyproofness, which requires that voters cannot benefit from submitting insincere preferences. Gibbard (1977) has shown that only rather unattractive rules…
The strong Allee effect plays an important role on the evolution of population in ecological systems. One important concept is the Allee threshold that determines the persistence or extinction of the population in a long time. In general, a…
We compare the speed with which a sexual, respectively an asexual, population is able to respond to a biased selective pressure. Our model focuses on the Weismann hypothesis that the extra variation caused by crossing-over and recombination…
Adaptation in response to selection on polygenic phenotypes may occur via subtle allele frequencies shifts at many loci. Current population genomic techniques are not well posed to identify such signals. In the past decade, detailed…
We analyse a family of two-types Wright-Fisher models with selection in a random environment and skewed offspring distribution. We provide a calculable criterion to quantify the impact of different shapes of selection on the fate of the…
Wang et al. (2025) use statistics to argue that sex at birth is not a biological coin toss, by noticing that repeated patterns such as Male Male Male and Female Female Female occur in the Nurses Health Study more often than patterns like…
A mutator is an allele that increases the mutation rate throughout the genome by disrupting some aspect of DNA replication or repair. Mutators that increase the mutation rate by the order of 100 fold have been observed to spontaneously…