Related papers: A Law of Nature?
We present numerical results based on a simplified ecological system in evolution, showing features of extinction similar to that claimed for the biosystem on Earth. In the model each species consists of a population in interaction with the…
Existing theoretical models of evolution focus on the relative fitness advantages of different mutants in a population while the dynamic behavior of the population size is mostly left unconsidered. We here present a generic stochastic model…
Ecological resilience refers to the ability of a system to retain its state when subject to state variables perturbations or parameter changes. While understanding and quantifying resilience is crucial to anticipate the possible regime…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
McNamara and Dall (2011) identified novel relationships between the abundance of a species in different environments, the temporal properties of environmental change, and selection for or against dispersal. Here, the mathematics underlying…
Cyclic dominance of competing species is an intensively used working hypothesis to explain biodiversity in certain living systems, where the evolutionary selection principle would dictate a single victor otherwise. Technically the…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
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,…
The strong Allee effect plays an important role on the evolution of population in ecological systems. One important concept is the Allee threshold that determines the persistence or extinction of the population in a long time. In general, a…
The role of the selection pressure and mutation amplitude on the behavior of a single-species population evolving on a two-dimensional lattice, in a periodically changing environment, is studied both analytically and numerically. The…
Taylor's Law (TL) relates the variance to the mean of a random variable via power law. In ecology it applies to populationsand it is a common empirical pattern shared among different ecosystems. Measurements give power law exponent to be…
Ignoring the differences between countries, human reproductive and dispersal behaviors can be described by some standardized models, so whether there is a universal law of population growth hidden in the abundant and unstructured data from…
Based on the principle of causality, I advance a new principle of variation and try to use it as the most general principle for research into laws of nature.
In a complex community, species continuously adapt to each other. On rare occasions, the adaptation of a species can lead to the extinction of others, and even its own. "Adaptive dynamics" is the standard mathematical framework to describe…
Aging is thought to be a consequence of intrinsic breakdowns in how genetic information is processed. But mounting experimental evidence suggests that aging can be slowed. To help resolve this mystery, I derive a mortality equation which…
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…
Ecologists have long argued about the strength of density dependence and population regulation, respectively defined as the short-term and long-term rates of return to equilibrium. Here, I give three arguments for the intractability of…
Human population is at the centre of research on global environmental change. On the one hand, population dynamics influence the environment and the global climate system through consumption-based carbon emissions. On the other hand, health…
In constant-payoff finite population games, when selection is weak and population size is large, the one-third law serves as the condition for a strategy to be advantageous. We generalize the result to the case where payoff matrices are…
Biological approximations, which are universal for diverse species, are well known. With no other experimental data, their invariance to transformations from one species to another yields exact conservation (with respect to biological…