Related papers: Average sex ratio and population maintenance cost

Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…

Age and gender are two important factors that play crucial roles in the way organisms allocate their social effort. In this study, we analyse a large mobile phone dataset to explore the way lifehistory influences human sociality and the way…

This paper presents a semi-quantitative mathematical model of the changes over time in the statistical distribution of well-being of individuals in a society. The model predicts that when individuals overvalue the more socially conspicuous…

One of the most challenging issues of evolutionary biology concerns speciation, the emergence of new species from an initial one. The huge amount of species found in nature demands a simple and robust mechanism. Yet, no consensus has been…

We analyze the long-term stability of a stochastic model designed to illustrate the adaptation of a population to variation in its environment. A piecewise-deterministic process modeling adaptation is coupled to a Feller logistic diffusion…

The state of the art on the issue of sex differences in research efficiency agrees in recognizing higher performances for males, however there are divergences in explaining the possible causes. One of the causes advanced is that there are…

Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…

This paper proposes a model to explain the potential role of inter-group conflicts in determining the rise and fall of signaling norms. Individuals in a population are characterized by high and low productivity types and they are matched in…

The classic Trivers-Willard hypothesis suggested the existence of means or conditions able to influence or control the sex of the offspring. Here I propose that mechanisms for the alteration of the gender of the offspring could possibly be…

An overwhelming majority of humans are right-handed. Numerous explanations for individual handedness have been proposed, but this population-level handedness remains puzzling. Here we use a minimal mathematical model to explain this…

This Letter studies the quasispecies dynamics of a population capable of genetic repair evolving on a time-dependent fitness landscape. We develop a model that considers an asexual population of single-stranded, conservatively replicating…

There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…

Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…

Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…

Consider a species whose population density solves the steady diffusive logistic equation in a heterogeneous environment modeled with the help of a spatially non constant coefficient standing for a resources distribution in a given box. We…

Most population models assume that individuals within a given population are identical, that is, the fundamental role of variation is ignored. Inhomogeneous models of populations and communities allow for birth and death rates to vary among…

We present a novel system of equations to describe the evolution of self-organized structured societies (biological or human) composed of several trait groups. The suggested approach is based on the combination of ideas employed in the…

We consider a fitness-structured population model with competition and migration between nearest neighbors. Under a combination of large population and rare migration limits we are particularly interested in the asymptotic behavior of the…

The interaction of all mobile species with their environment hinges on their movement patterns: the places they visit and how frequently they go there. In human society, where the prevalent form of cohabitation is in cities, the highly…

A general procedure to formulate asexual (unstructured, deterministic) population dynamical models resulting from individual pairwise interactions is proposed. Individuals are characterized by a continuous strategy that represents all their…