Related papers: Evolutionary Model of Species Body Mass Diversific…
Fluctuations in diversity and extinction sizes are discussed and compared for two different, individual-based models of biological coevolution. Both models display power-law distributions for various quantities of evolutionary interest,…
Models relating to the Species-Area curve are usually defined at the species level, and concerned only with ecological timescales. We examine an individual-based model of co-evolution on a spatial lattice based on the Tangled Nature model,…
A mass ejection model in a time-dependent random environment with both temporal and spatial correlations is introduced. When the environment has a finite correlation length, individual particle trajectories are found to diffuse at large…
The biological theory of adaptive dynamics proposes a description of the long-term evolution of a structured asexual population. It is based on the assumptions of large population, rare mutations and small mutation steps, that lead to a…
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…
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the…
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…
We study the stochastic evolution of four species in cyclic competition in a well mixed environment. In systems composed of a finite number $N$ of particles these simple interaction rules result in a rich variety of extinction scenarios,…
We introduce a new model for large scale evolution and extinction in which species are organized into food chains. The system evolves by two processes: origination/speciation and extinction. In the model, extinction of a given species can…
We introduce a model of biological evolution where species evolve in response to biotic interactions and a fluctuating environmental stress. The species may either become extinct or mutate to acquire a new fitness value when the effective…
Twenty years ago, after analysing palaeontological data, Raup and Sepkoski suggested that mass extinctions on Earth appear cyclically in time with a period of approximately 26 million years (My). To explain the 26My period, a number of…
We study the multi-species replicator model with linear fitness and random fitness matrices of various classes. By means of numerical resolution of the replicator equations, we determine the survival probability of a species in terms of its…
The question of whether a population will persist or go extinct is of key interest throughout ecology and biology. Various mathematical techniques allow us to generate knowledge regarding individual behaviour, which can be analysed to…
We introduce an evolutionary metacommunity of multitrophic food webs on several habitats coupled by migration. In contrast to previous studies that focus either on evolutionary or on spatial aspects, we include both and investigate the…
A number of authors have in recent years proposed that the processes of macroevolution may give rise to self-organized critical phenomena which could have a significant effect on the dynamics of ecosystems. In particular it has been…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
In a complex community, species continuously adapt to each other. On rare occasions, the adaptation of a species can lead to the extinction of others, and even its own. "Adaptive dynamics" is the standard mathematical framework to describe…
The spatio-temporal dynamics of a population present one of the most fascinating aspects and challenges for ecological modelling. In this article we review some simple mathematical models, based on one dimensional…
We compare and contrast the long-time dynamical properties of two individual-based models of biological coevolution. Selection occurs via multispecies, stochastic population dynamics with reproduction probabilities that depend nonlinearly…