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One strategy for winning a coevolutionary struggle is to evolve rapidly. Most of the literature on host-pathogen coevolution focuses on this phenomenon, and looks for consequent evidence of coevolutionary arms races. An alternative…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
Genome-wide patterns of genetic divergence reveal mechanisms of adaptation under gene flow. Empirical data show that divergence is mostly concentrated in narrow genomic regions. This pattern may arise because differentiated loci protect…
The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…
Niching enables a genetic algorithm (GA) to maintain diversity in a population. It is particularly useful when the problem has multiple optima where the aim is to find all or as many as possible of these optima. When the fitness landscape…
Existing theories for the evolution of aging and death treat senescence as a side-effect of strong selection for fertility. These theories are well-developed mathematically, but fit poorly with emerging experimental data. The data suggest…
Evolutionary systems must learn to generalize, often extrapolating from a limited set of selective conditions to anticipate future environmental changes. The mechanisms enabling such generalization remain poorly understood, despite their…
In order to make a case for or against a trend in the evolution of complexity in biological evolution, complexity needs to be both rigorously defined and measurable. A recent information-theoretic (but intuitively evident) definition…
Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…
We introduce and analyse an individual-based evolutionary model, in which a population of genetically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources. Through theoretical analysis and stochastic simulations, we show that the…
Natural selection explains how life has evolved over millions of years from more primitive forms. The speed at which this happens, however, has sometimes defied formal explanations when based on random (uniformly distributed) mutations.…
Identifying drivers of complex traits from the noisy signals of genetic variation obtained from high throughput genome sequencing technologies is a central challenge faced by human geneticists today. We hypothesize that the variants…
Living systems adapt to various environmental conditions by changing their internal states. Inspired by gene expression and epigenetic modification dynamics, we herein propose a generic mechanism for adaptation by combining fast oscillatory…
Complex adaptive systems have been the subject of much recent attention. It is by now well-established that members (`agents') tend to self-segregate into opposing groups characterized by extreme behavior. However, while different social…
We investigate the evolutionary rescue of a microbial population in a gradually deteriorating environment, through a combination of analytical calculations and stochastic simulations. We consider a population destined for extinction in the…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
The subject of this paper is inspired by \cite{CC} and \cite{CCP}. In \cite{CC} the authors investigate the dynamics of a population in a heterogeneous environment by means of diffusive logistic equations. An important part of their study…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
Evolutionary Robotics offers the possibility to design robots to solve a specific task automatically by optimizing their morphology and control together. However, this co-optimization of body and control is challenging, because controllers…
The evolution of two species with different fitness is investigated on degree-heterogeneous graphs. The population evolves either by one individual dying and being replaced by the offspring of a random neighbor (voter model (VM) dynamics)…