Related papers: Notes from the Greenhouse World: A Study in Coevol…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…
Ecologists have put forward many explanations for coexistence, but these are only partial explanations; nature is complex, so it is reasonable to assume that in any given ecological community, multiple mechanisms of coexistence are…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
The global chaos caused by the 19 July 2024 technology meltdown highlights the need for a theory of what large-scale cohesive behaviors -- dangerous or desirable -- could suddenly emerge from future systems of interacting humans, machinery…
Feedback-evolving games is a framework that models the co-evolution between payoff functions and an environmental state. It serves as a useful tool to analyze many social dilemmas such as natural resource consumption, behaviors in…
The governance of common-pool resources-resource systems characterized by high subtractability of yield and difficulty of exclusion-constitutes one of the most persistent and intricate challenges in the fields of economics, ecology, and…
Ecosystems tend to fluctuate around stable equilibria in response to internal dynamics and environmental factors. Occasionally, they enter an unstable tipping region and collapse into an alternative stable state. Our understanding of how…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
When searching for inhabited exoplanets, understanding the boundaries of the habitable zone around the parent star is key. If life can strongly influence its global environment, then we would expect the boundaries of the habitable zone to…
The evolution of cooperation has been a perennial problem for evolutionary biology because cooperation is undermined by selfish cheaters (or "free riders") that profit from cooperators but do not invest any resources themselves. In a purely…
We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…
A fundamental problem in evolutionary ecology research is to explain how different species coexist in natural ecosystems. This question is directly related with species trophic competition. However, competition theory, based on the…
We modify the Tangled Nature Model of Christensen et. al. so that the agents affect the carrying capacity. This leads to a model of species-environment co-evolution where the system tends to have a larger carrying capacity with life than…
Social structure affects the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. Here we study the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in fragmented societies, and show that conjoining segregated cooperation-inhibiting groups, if done properly,…
Understanding when global glaciations occur on Earth-like planets is a major challenge in climate evolution research. Most models of how greenhouse gases like CO2 evolve with time on terrestrial planets are deterministic, but the complex,…
The evolutionary dynamics of the Public Goods game addresses the emergence of cooperation within groups of individuals. However, the Public Goods game on large populations of interconnected individuals has been usually modeled without any…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
We introduce the Webworld model, which links together the ecological modelling of food web structure with the evolutionary modelling of speciation and extinction events. The model describes dynamics of ecological communities on an…
Individual success in group-structured populations has two components. First, an individual gains by outcompeting its neighbors for local resources. Second, an individual's share of group success must be weighted by the total productivity…
Prevalence of cooperation within groups of selfish individuals is puzzling in that it contradicts with the basic premise of natural selection. Favoring players with higher fitness, the latter is key for understanding the challenges faced by…