Related papers: Phase Transition in Sexual Reproduction and Biolog…
Predicting evolution of expanding populations is critical to control biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with examples of…
By introducing the notions of living and dead nodes a new model of random tree evolution with continuous time parameter has been constructed. It is assumed that two random variables, the lifetime and the offspring number of living nodes…
We consider the dynamics imposed by natural selection on the populations of two competing, sexually reproducing, haploid species. In this setting, the fitness of any genome varies over time due to the changing population mix of the…
In a wide variety of natural systems, closely-related microbial strains coexist stably, resulting in high levels of fine-scale biodiversity. However, the mechanisms that stabilize this coexistence are not fully understood. Spatial…
Starting with Darwin, biologists have asked how populations evolve from a low fitness state that is evolutionarily stable to a high fitness state that is not. Specifically of interest is the emergence of cooperation and multicellularity…
A mechanism of sympatric speciation is presented based on the interaction-induced developmental plasticity of phenotypes. First, phenotypes of individuals with identical genotypes split into a few groups, according to instability in the…
We investigate the macroscopic effects of the ingredients that drive the origin of species through sympatric speciation. In our model, sympatric speciation is obtained as we tune up the strength of competition between individuals with…
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…
Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…
Diverse communities of competing species are generally characterized by substantial niche overlap and strongly stochastic dynamics. Abundance fluctuations are proportional to population size, so the dynamics of rare populations is slower.…
Current-day genomes bear the mark of the evolutionary processes. One of the strongest indications is the sequence homology among families of proteins that perform similar biological functions in different species. The number of proteins in…
Many experimental and field studies have shown that adaptation can occur very rapidly. Two qualitatively different modes of fast adaptation have been proposed: selective sweeps wherein large shifts in the allele frequencies occur at a few…
In genetics the Moran model describes the neutral evolution of a bi-allelic gene in a population of haploid individuals subjected to mutations. We show in this paper that this model can be mapped into an influence dynamical process on…
We analyze a variant of the Noisy $K$-Branching Random Walk, a population model that evolves according to the following procedure. At each time step, each individual produces a large number of offspring that inherit the fitness of their…
A new mean field statistical mechanics model of two interacting groups of spins is introduced and the phase transition studied in terms of their relative size. A jump of the average magnetization is found for large values of the mutual…
The goal of this article is to contribute towards the conceptual and quantitative understanding of the evolutionary benefits for (microbial) populations to maintain a seed bank (consisting of dormant individuals) when facing fluctuating…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
We study biological evolution in a high-dimensional genotype space in the regime of rare mutations and strong selection. The population performs an uphill walk which terminates at local fitness maxima. Assigning fitness randomly to…
Microbial populations adapt to their environment by acquiring advantageous mutations, but in the early twentieth century, questions about how these organisms acquire mutations arose. The experiment of Salvador Luria and Max Delbr\"uck that…
We have simulated demographic changes in the human population using the Penna microscopic model, based on the simple Monte Carlo method. The results of simulations have shown that during a few generations changes in the genetic pool of a…