Related papers: Change and Aging Senescence as an adaptation
Models of many-species ecosystems, such as the Lotka-Volterra and replicator equations, suggest that these systems generically exhibit near-extinction processes, where population sizes go very close to zero for some time before rebounding,…
Several studies question the adaptive value of female preferences for older males. Theory and evidence show that older males carry more deleterious mutations in their sperm than younger males carry. These mutations are not visible to…
The observation that phenotypic variability is ubiquitous in isogenic populations has led to a multitude of experimental and theoretical studies seeking to probe the causes and consequences of this variability. Whether it be in the context…
Using a lattice model based on Monte Carlo simulations, we study the role of the reproduction pattern on the fate of an evolving population. Each individual is under the selection pressure from the environment and random mutations. The…
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…
Collective sensing is an emergent phenomenon which enables individuals to estimate a hidden property of the environment through the observation of social interactions. Previous work on collective sensing shows that gregarious individuals…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
We study a mathematical model describing the growth process of a population structured by age and a phenotypical trait, subject to aging, competition between individuals and rare mutations. Our goals are to describe the asymptotic behaviour…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
The outcomes of evolution are determined by which mutations occur and fix. In rapidly adapting microbial populations, this process is particularly hard to predict because lineages with different beneficial mutations often spread…
We propose a simple model for genetic adaptation to a changing environment, describing a fitness landscape characterized by two maxima. One is associated with "specialist" individuals that are adapted to the environment; this maximum moves…
In this paper, we inspect well-known population genetics and social dynamics models. In these models, interacting individuals, while participating in a self-organizing process, give rise to the emergence of complex behaviors and patterns.…
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.…
This paper demonstrates that simple yet important characteristics of coevolution can occur in evolutionary algorithms when only a few conditions are met. We find that interaction-based fitness measurements such as fitness (linear) ranking…
With rising life expectancies around the world and an older scientific workforce than ever before, what does aging mean for individual scientists, and what do aging scientists mean for scientific progress as a whole? Here we examine how…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
In many indigenous societies, people are categorised into several cultural groups, or clans, within which they believe to share ancestors. Clan attributions provide certain rules for marriage and descent. Such rules between clans constitute…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
The study of immune system aging, i.e. immunosenescence, is a relatively new research topic. It deals with understanding the processes of immunodegradation that indicate signs of functionality loss possibly leading to death. Even though it…