Related papers: An Illustrated Introduction to the Basic Biologica…
Evolutionary success depends on the capacity to adapt: organisms must respond to environmental challenges through both genetic innovation and lifetime learning. The gene-centric paradigm attributes evolutionary causality exclusively to…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
Biological systems reach hierarchical complexity that has no counterpart outside the realm of biology. Undoubtedly, biological entities obey the fundamental physical laws. Can today's physics provide an explanatory framework for…
Natural selection imply that any organisms including human being will evolve to improve its fitness advantage and the selected genotype or phenotype in equilibrium state will not vary over the time. However, evolutionary process of…
A theoretical construction of the genetic material establishes the unique and ideal character of DNA. A similar conclusion is reached for amino acids and proteins.
A key goal in studies of ecology and evolution is understanding the causes of phenotypic diversity in nature. Most traits of interest, such as those relating to morphology, life-history, immunity and behaviour are quantitative, and…
Nearly invariably, phenotypes are reported in the scientific literature in meticulous detail, utilizing the full expressivity of natural language. Often it is particularly these detailed observations (facts) that are of interest, and thus…
Classical population genetics a priori assigns fitness to alleles without considering molecular or functional properties of proteins that these alleles encode. Here we study population dynamics in a model where fitness can be inferred from…
The adaptation rate in theoretical models of biological evolution increases with the mutation rate but only to a point when mutations into lethal states cause extinction. One would expect that removing such states should be beneficial for…
We introduce a new model of evolution on a fitness landscape possessing a tunable degree of neutrality. The model allows us to study the general properties of molecular species undergoing neutral evolution. We find that a number of…
Ontologies such as taxonomies, product catalogs or web directories are heavily used and hence evolve frequently to meet new requirements or to better reflect the current instance data of a domain. To effectively manage the evolution of…
It is usually believed that Darwin's theory leads to a smooth gradual evolution, so that mass extinctions must be caused by external shocks. However, it has recently been argued that mass extinctions arise from the intrinsic dynamics of…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…
The origin of life occupies a very important place in the study of the evolution. Its liminal location between life and non-life poses special challenges to researchers who study this subject. Current approaches in studying the origin and…
Cells generally change their internal state to adapt to an environmental change, and accordingly evolve in response to the new conditions. This process involves phenotypic changes that occur over several different time scales, ranging from…
We study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…
Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…
A general and basic model of primordial evolution--a soup of reacting finitary and discrete processes--is employed to identify and analyze fundamental mechanisms that generate and maintain complex structures in prebiotic systems. The…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…