Related papers: Survival benefits in mimicry: a quantitative frame…
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…
Containing the spreading of crime is a major challenge for society. Yet, since thousands of years, no effective strategy has been found to overcome crime. To the contrary, empirical evidence shows that crime is recurrent, a fact that is not…
Cooperation in evolutionary biology means paying a cost, c, to enjoy benefits, b. A defector is one who does not pay any cost but enjoys the benefits of cooperators. Human societies, especially, have evolved a strategy to discourage…
We study the role of imitation within a model of economics with adaptive agents. The basic ingredients are those of the Minority Game. We add the possibility of local information exchange and imitation of the neighbour's strategy. Imitators…
Territorial behaviour is widespread in the animal kingdom, with creatures seeking to gain parts of space for their exclusive use. It arises through a complicated interplay of many different behavioural features. Extracting and quantifying…
Although the existence of robust inverted biomass pyramids seem paradoxical, they have been observed in planktonic communities, and more recently, in pristine coral reefs. Understanding the underlying mechanisms which produce inverted…
When a prediction algorithm serves a collection of users, disparities in prediction quality are likely to emerge. If users respond to accurate predictions by increasing engagement, inviting friends, or adopting trends, repeated learning…
Similarity of competitors has been proposed to facilitate coexistence of species because it slows down competitive exclusion, thus making it easier for equalizing mechanisms to maintain diverse communities. On the other hand, chaos can…
The emergence of cooperation among self-interested agents has been a key concern of the multi-agent systems community for decades. With the increased importance of network-mediated interaction, researchers have shifted the attention on the…
With the internet, a massive amount of information on species abundance can be collected under citizen science programs. However, these data are often difficult to use directly in statistical inference, as their collection is generally…
Systems composed of distinct complex networks are present in many real-world environments, from society to ecological systems. In the present paper, we propose a network model obtained as a consequence of interactions between two species…
Recent experimental results with humans involved in social dilemma games suggest that cooperation may be a contagious phenomenon and that the selection pressure operating on evolutionary dynamics (i.e., mimicry) is relatively weak. I…
How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
The fitness landscape metaphor plays a central role on the modeling of optimizing principles in many research fields, ranging from evolutionary biology, where it was first introduced, to management research. Here we consider the ensemble of…
This paper demonstrates that simple yet important characteristics of coevolution can occur in evolutionary algorithms when only a few conditions are met. We find that interaction-based fitness measurements such as fitness (linear) ranking…
We study the effect of speciation, i.e. the introduction of new species through evolution into communities, in the setting of predator-prey systems. Predator-prey dynamics is classically well modeled by Lotka-Volterra equations, also when…
An open problem in evolutionary game dynamics is to understand the effect of peer pressure on cooperation in a quantitative manner. Peer pressure can be modeled by punishment, which has been proved to be an effective mechanism to sustain…
We study a set of six-species ecological models where each species has two predators and two preys. On a square lattice the time evolution is governed by iterated invasions between the neighboring predator-prey pairs chosen at random and by…
The population size ("abundance") of wildlife species has central interest in ecological research and management. Distance sampling is a dominant approach to the estimation of wildlife abundance for many vertebrate animal species. One…