Related papers: Average sex ratio and population maintenance cost
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…
The attempt to determine the population growth rate from field data reveals several ambiguities in its definition(s), which seem to throw into question the very concept itself. However, an alternative point of view is proposed that not only…
In the stable marriage problem N men and N women have to be matched by pairs under the constraint that the resulting matching is stable. We study the statistical properties of stable matchings in the large N limit using both numerical and…
What is a population? This review considers how a population may be defined in terms of understanding the structure of the underlying genetics of the individuals involved. The main approach is to consider statistically identifiable groups…
The stable marriage problem is a well-known problem of matching men to women so that no man and woman, who are not married to each other, both prefer each other. Such a problem has a wide variety of practical applications, ranging from…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
Suppose that females choose males based on attributes that do not signal any genetic quality that is not related to the choice itself. Can being choosy confer selective advantage in this situation? We introduce correlated strategies, which…
The stable marriage problem has been introduced in order to describe a complex system where individuals attempt to optimise their own satisfaction, subject to mutually conflicting constraints. Due to the potential large applicability of…
Despite the general acknowledgment of the role of niche and fitness differences in community dynamics, species abundance has been coined as a relevant feature not just regarding niche perspectives, but also according to neutral…
Same-sex sexual behavior is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, but its adaptive origins remain a prominent puzzle. Here I suggest the possibility that same-sex sexual behavior arises as a consequence of the competition between an…
The adult sex ratio (ASR) is defined as the number of fertile males divided by the number of fertile females in a population. We build an ODE model with minimal age structure, in which males compete for paternities using either a…
A model for the evolution of a finite population in a rugged fitness landscape is introduced and solved. The population is trapped in an evolutionary loop, alternating periods of stasis to periods in which it performs adaptive walks. The…
Sexually reproducing populations with small number of individuals may go extinct by stochastic fluctuations in sex determination, causing all their members to become male or female in a generation. In this work we calculate the time to…
Biological populations are subject to two types of noise: demographic stochasticity due to fluctuations in the reproductive success of individuals, and environmental variations that affect coherently the relative fitness of entire…
Why sex evolved and it prevails in nature remains one of the great puzzles of evolution. Most biologists would explain that it promotes genetic variability, however this explanation suffers from several difficulties. What advantages might…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
One of the most contested questions about human behaviour is whether there are inherent sex or gender differences in the formation and maintenance of social bonds. On one hand, female and male brains are structurally almost identical, and…
A new approach is developed to understand stability of a population and further understanding of population momentum.
In order to accommodate the empirical fact that population structures are rarely simple, modern studies of evolutionary dynamics allow for complicated and highly-heterogeneous spatial structures. As a result, one of the most difficult…