Related papers: Neutral networks of genotypes: Evolution behind th…
The process of evolutionary diversification unfolds in a vast genotypic space of potential outcomes. During the past century there have been remarkable advances in the development of theory for this diversification, and the theory's success…
Evolution gave rise to creatures that are arguably more sophisticated than the greatest human-designed systems. This feat has inspired computer scientists since the advent of computing and led to optimization tools that can evolve complex…
How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal…
Biological systems like long-lived clonal organisms, holobionts and clades challenge traditional evolutionary thinking since they adapt without populations or reproduction. This paper aims to provide an overarching theoretical framework…
Genotype networks are a method used in systems biology to study the "innovability" of a set of genotypes having the same phenotype. In the past they have been applied to determine the genetic heterogeneity, and stability to mutations, of…
Gene gains and losses have shaped the gene repertoire of species since the universal last common ancestor to species today. Genes in extant species were gained at different historical times via de novo creation of new genes, duplication of…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
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…
The recent discovery of universal principles underlying many complex networks occurring across a wide range of length scales in the biological world has spurred physicists in trying to understand such features using techniques from…
The problem of the rate and mechanisms of biological evolution was considered. It was shown that species could not be formed due to undirected mutations in characteristic times of about one million years. A mechanism of deterministic…
Jim Shapiro synthesizes a great many observations about the mechanisms of evolution to reach the remarkable conclusion that large-scale modification, exchange, and rearrangement of the genome are common and should be viewed as fundamental…
Population structure can be modelled by evolutionary graphs, which can have a substantial, but very subtle influence on the fate of the arising mutants. Individuals are located on the nodes of these graphs, competing with each other to…
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…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…
The number of fixed mutations accumulated in an evolving population often displays a variance that is significantly larger than the mean (the overdispersed molecular clock). By examining a generic evolutionary process on a neutral network…
We propose a class of evolutionary models that involves an arbitrary exchangeable process as the breeding process and different selection schemes. In those models, a new genome is born according to the breeding process, and then a genome is…
This short paper presents an abstract, tunable model of genomic structural change within the cell lifecycle and explores its use with simulated evolution. A well-known Boolean model of genetic regulatory networks is extended to include…
A list of open problems on global behavior in time of some evolution systems, mainly governed by P.D.E, is given together with some background information explaining the context in which these problems appeared. The common characteristic of…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…