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Mathematical theory of selection is developed within the frameworks of general models of inhomogeneous populations with continuous time. Methods that allow us to study the distribution dynamics under natural selection and to construct…
We study the asymptotic distribution for the occurrence time of the next large earthquake, by knowing the last large seismic event occurred a long time ago. We prove that, under reasonable conditions, such a distribution is asymptotically…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
The diameter distribution of a given species of deciduous trees in mature, temperate zone forests is well approximated by a Gamma distribution. Here we give new experimental evidence for this conjecture by analyzing deciduous tree size data…
The recent availability of large databases allows to study macroscopic properties of many complex systems. However, inferring a model from a fit of empirical data without any knowledge of the dynamics might lead to erroneous interpretations…
We present a thermodynamic theory for a generic population of $M$ individuals distributed into $N$ groups (clusters). We construct the ensemble of all distributions with fixed $M$ and $N$, introduce a selection functional that embodies the…
We search for the most suitable set of cosmological parameters that describes the observable universe. The search includes the possibility of quintessential flat universes, i.e., the analysis is restricted to the determination of the…
Disordered systems are characterized by the existence of many sample- dependent local energy minima, that cause a stepwise response when the system is perturbed. In this article we use an approach based on elementary probabilistic methods…
Counts of galaxies as a function of apparent magnitude are among the most time-honored observations in cosmology. In this Letter, we focus on some statistical properties of these counts which are fundamental in order to characterize the…
We develop a stochastic formulation of cosmology in the early universe, after considering the scatter in the redshift-apparent magnitude diagram in the early epochs as an observational evidence for the non-deterministic evolution of early…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
We compute the expected value of the cosmological constant in our universe from the Causal Entropic Principle. Since observers must obey the laws of thermodynamics and causality, the principle asserts that physical parameters are most…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
In the modern quantum mechanics of cosmology observers are physical systems within the universe. They have no preferred role in the formulation of the theory nor in its predictions of third person probabilities of what occurs. However,…
We explain the ubiquity and extremely slow evolution of non gaussian out-of-equilibrium distributions for the Hamiltonian Mean-Field model, by means of traditional kinetic theory. Deriving the Fokker-Planck equation for a test particle, one…
The suggestion that there exist causally disconnected universes or sub-universes to explain the values of physical parameters such as the cosmological constant is discussed. A statistical model of the string landscape/topography is…
Will a new smartphone application diffuse deeply in the population or will it sink into oblivion soon? To predict this, we argue that common models of spread of innovations based on cascade dynamics or epidemics may not be fully adequate.…
The process of `Evolutionary Diffusion', i.e. reproduction with local mutation but without selection in a biological population, resembles standard Diffusion in many ways. However, Evolutionary Diffusion allows the formation of local peaks…
We are interested in modelling Darwinian evolution, resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. Our models are rooted in the microscopic, stochastic description of a population…
In population dynamics, mathematical models often contain too many parameters to be easily testable. A way to reliably estimate parameters for a broad range of systems would help us obtain clearer predictions from theory. In this paper, we…