Related papers: Does Sex Induce a Phase Transition?
Sex in higher diploids carries a two-fold cost of males that should reduce its fitness relative to cloning and result in its extinction. Instead, sex is widespread and it is clonal species that face early obsolescence. One possible reason…
Demographic transition, characterized by declines in fertility and mortality, is a global phenomenon associated with modernization. While typical patterns of fertility decline are observed in Western countries, their applicability to other…
In complex systems, the interplay between nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, e.g., J. Monod's necessity and chance, gives rise to an evolutionary process in Darwinian sense, in terms of discrete jumps among attractors, with punctuated…
This paper suggests that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. With this explanation for the basic cycle, the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution…
We examine birth--death processes with state dependent transition probabilities and at least one absorbing boundary. In evolution, this describes selection acting on two different types in a finite population where reproductive events occur…
The mutual influence of dynamics and structure is a central issue in complex systems. In this paper we study by simulation slow evolution of network under the feedback of a local-majority-rule opinion process. If performance-enhancing local…
In a physical system, changing parameters such as temperature can induce a phase transition: an abrupt change from one state of matter to another. Analogous phenomena have recently been observed in large language models. Typically, the task…
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
We discover the mechanism for the transition from self-segregation (into opposing groups) to clustering (towards cautious behaviors) in the evolutionary minority game (EMG). The mechanism is illustrated with a statistical mechanics analysis…
One of the most challenging issues of evolutionary biology concerns speciation, the emergence of new species from an initial one. The huge amount of species found in nature demands a simple and robust mechanism. Yet, no consensus has been…
Individuals of different types, may it be genetic, cultural, or else, with different levels of fitness often compete for reproduction and survival. A fitter type generally has higher chances of disseminating their copies to other…
The dynamics of molecular collisions in a macroscopic body are encoded by the parameter Thermodynamic entropy - a statistical measure of the number of molecular configurations that correspond to a given macrostate. Directionality in the…
Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Adaptation often involves the acquisition of a large number of genomic changes which arise as mutations in single individuals. In asexual populations, combinations of mutations can fix only when they arise in the same lineage, but for…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. In stochastic descriptions of evolutionary dynamics, such as the Moran process, individuals are chosen randomly for birth and for death. If the same type is chosen for both steps,…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
We study the effect of correlations in generation times on the dynamics of population growth of microorganisms. We show that any non-zero correlation that is due to cell-size regulation, no matter how small, induces long-term oscillations…
Horizontal gene transfer consists in exchanging genetic materials between microorganisms during their lives. This is a major mechanism of bacterial evolution and is believed to be of main importance in antibiotics resistance. We consider a…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…