Related papers: Hominid evolution: genetics versus memetics
To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…
Sweepstakes reproduction may be generated by chance matching of reproduction with favorable environmental conditions. Gene genealogies generated by sweepstakes reproduction are in the domain of attraction of multiple-merger coalescents…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
Humans have created artificial intelligence (AI), not the other way around. This statement is deceptively obvious. In this note, we decided to challenge this statement as a small, lighthearted Gedankenexperiment. We ask a simple question:…
The dynamic theory of inhomogeneous populations developed during the last decade predicts several essential new dynamic regimes applicable even to the well-known, simple population models. We show that, in an inhomogeneous population with a…
Fundamental properties of macroscopic gene-mating dynamic evolutionary systems are investigated. We focus on a single locus, any number of alleles in a two-gender dioecious population, for a large class of systems within population…
We review and extend results for mutation, selection, genetic drift, and migration in a one-dimensional continuous population. The population is described by a continuous limit of the stepping stone model, which leads to the stochastic…
We are interested in modeling some two-level population dynamics, resulting from the interplay of ecological interactions and phenotypic variation of individuals (or hosts) and the evolution of cells (or parasites) of two types living in…
We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…
We are interested in populations in which the fitness of different genetic types fluctuates in time and space, driven by temporal and spatial fluctuations in the environment. For simplicity, our population is assumed to be composed of just…
It is argued that human consciousness is likely to have emerged during the self-consistent evolution of the physical universe, through the gradual accumulation of biological entities' ability to tap into the intrinsic non-deterministic…
In the first paper of this series, we included the effects of population genetics in the agent-based Monte Carlo code HERITAGE under the hypothesis of neutral phenotypic effects. It implied that mutations (genetic changes) had only neutral…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
In this paper, we consider a two-player two-strategy game with random payoffs in a population subdivided into $d$ demes, each containing $N$ individuals at the beginning of any given generation and experiencing local extinction and…
A natural phenomenon occurring in a living system is an outcome of the dynamics of the specific biological network underlying the phenomenon. The collective dynamics have both deterministic and stochastic components. The stochastic nature…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…
We will give a simple, unified, possible explanation of several debated genetic issues on today's humans, Neandertals and Denisovans. In particular it is shown by means of a simple mathematical model why there is little genetic variation in…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…