Related papers: Shaping Robust System through Evolution
We examine the effect of noise on societies of agents using an agent-based model of evolutionary norm emergence. Generally, we see that noisy societies are more selfish, smaller and discontent, and are caught in rounds of perpetual…
Evolutionary game theory has traditionally employed deterministic models to describe population dynamics. These models, due to their inherent nonlinearities, can exhibit deterministic chaos, where population fluctuations follow complex,…
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…
Environmental variability greatly influences the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a population, i.e. it affects how its size and composition evolve. Here, we study a well-mixed population of finite and fluctuating size whose growth is limited…
Evolution depends on the possibility of successfully exploring fitness landscapes via mutation and recombination. With these search procedures, exploration is difficult in "rugged" fitness landscapes, where small mutations can drastically…
Evolutionary game theory offers a general framework to study how behaviors evolve by social learning in a population. This body of theory can accommodate a range of social dilemmas, or games, as well as real-world complexities such as…
We consider the dynamics of a population of organisms containing two mutually inhibitory gene regulatory networks, that can result in a bistable switch-like behaviour. We completely characterize their local and global dynamics in the…
Most biological systems are formed by component parts that to some degree are inter-related. Groups of parts that are more associated among themselves and are relatively autonomous from others are called modules. One of the consequences of…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…
Understanding under which conditions the increase of systems complexity is evolutionary advantageous, and how this trend is related to the modulation of the intrinsic noise, are fascinating issues of utmost importance for synthetic and…
It has been demonstrated that one of the most striking features of the nervous system, the so called 'plasticity' (i.e high adaptability at different structural levels) is primarily based on Hebbian learning which is a collection of…
First return maps of interspike intervals for biological neurons that generate repetitive bursts of impulses can display stereotyped structures (neuronal signatures). Such structures have been linked to the possibility of multicoding and…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
Bistable biological regulatory systems need to cope with stochastic noise to fine-tune their function close to bifurcation points. Here, we study stability properties of this regime in generic systems to demonstrate that cooperative…
Search for possible relationships between phylogeny and ontogeny is one of the most important issues in the field of evolutionary developmental biology. By representing developmental dynamics of spatially located cells with gene expression…
Stochasticity in gene expression can give rise to fluctuations in protein levels and lead to phenotypic variation across a population of genetically identical cells. Recent experiments indicate that bursting and feedback mechanisms play…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
In evolution, the effects of a single deleterious mutation can sometimes be compensated for by a second mutation which recovers the original phenotype. Such epistatic interactions have implications for the structure of genome space -…
Biological systems, with many interacting components, face high-dimensional environmental fluctuations, ranging from diverse nutrient deprivations to toxins, drugs, and physical stresses. Yet, many biological control mechanisms are `simple'…
Biological networks of interacting agents exhibit similar topological properties for a wide range of scales, from cellular to ecological levels, suggesting the existence of a common evolutionary origin. A general evolutionary mechanism…