Related papers: Skepsis on the scenario of Biological Evolution pr…

Biological living systems in general exhibit complex and diverse dynamics. The latter, in particular, is essential, since diversification increases the odds of survival of an organism while reducing the risk of extinction of the population.…

In the spirit of the many recent simple models of evolution inspired by statistical physics, we put forward a simple model of the evolution of such models. Like its objects of study, it is (one supposes) in principle testable and capable of…

Stochasticity is both exploited and controlled by cells. Although the intrinsic stochasticity inherent in biochemistry is relatively well understood, cellular variation, or 'noise', is predominantly generated by interactions of the system…

We introduce a solvable model of randomly growing systems consisting of many independent subunits. Scaling relations and growth rate distributions in the limit of infinite subunits are analysed theoretically. Various types of scaling…

We introduce a model to study the impact of catastrophes on evolutionary paths. If we do not allow catastrophes the number of changes in the maximum fitness of a population grows logarithmically with respect to time. Allowing catastrophes…

Phylogenetic trees capture evolutionary relationships among species and reflect the forces that shaped them. While many studies rely on branch length information, the topology of phylogenetic trees (particularly their degree of imbalance)…

Growth-fragmentation processes model systems of cells that grow continuously over time and then fragment into smaller pieces. Typically, on average, the number of cells in the system exhibits asynchronous exponential growth and, upon…

We review the mathematical formalism underlying the modelling of stochasticity in biological systems. Beginning with a description of the system in terms of its basic constituents, we derive the mesoscopic equations governing the dynamics…

We describe a simple model of evolution which incorporates the branching and extinction of species lines, and also includes abiotic influences. A first principles approach is taken in which the probability for speciation and extinction are…

I discuss the so-called stochastic individual based model of adaptive dynamics and in particular how different scaling limits can be obtained by taking limits of large populations, small mutation rate, and small effect of single mutations…

Biologists and physicists have a rich tradition of modeling living systems with simple models composed of a few interacting components. Despite the remarkable success of this approach, it remains unclear how to use such finely tuned models…

Proliferating cell populations at steady state growth often exhibit broad protein distributions with exponential tails. The sources of this variation and its universality are of much theoretical interest. Here we address the problem by…

In this paper we derive a statistical law of Life. It governs the probability of death, or complementary of survival, of the living organisms. We have deduced such a law coupling the widely used Weibull statistics, developed for describing…

Biological systems are characterized by the ubiquitous roles of weak, that is, non-covalent molecular interactions, small, often very small, numbers of specific molecules per cell, and Brownian motion. These combine to produce stochastic…

There have been many studies to examine whether one trait is correlated with another trait across a group of present-day species (for example, do species with larger brains tend to have longer gestation times. Since the introduction of the…

The Bayesian method is noted to produce spuriously high posterior probabilities for phylogenetic trees in analysis of large datasets, but the precise reasons for this over-confidence are unknown. In general, the performance of Bayesian…

A discrete time branching process where the offspring distribution is generation-dependent, and the number of reproductive individuals is controlled by a random mechanism is considered. This model is a Markov chain but, in general, the…

We analyze the long-term stability of a stochastic model designed to illustrate the adaptation of a population to variation in its environment. A piecewise-deterministic process modeling adaptation is coupled to a Feller logistic diffusion…

Behavior of condensed matter systems deviating from the standard equilibrium conditions is discussed. Statistical properties of coupled dynamic-stochastic systems are studied within a combination of the maximum information principle and the…

Random walks on multidimensional nonlinear landscapes are of interest in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, properties of adaptive trajectories on fitness landscapes determine population fates and thus play a central role…