Related papers: The Diversity Paradox: How Nature Resolves an Evol…
The current rate of species extinction is rapidly approaching unprecedented highs and life on Earth presently faces a sixth mass extinction event driven by anthropogenic activity, climate change and ecological collapse. The field of…
Evolutionary algorithms have been successfully applied to a variety of optimisation problems in stationary environments. However, many real world optimisation problems are set in dynamic environments where the success criteria shifts…
Numerous traits under migration-selection balance are shown to exhibit complex patterns of genetic architecture with large variance in effect sizes. However, the conditions under which such genetic architectures are stable have yet to be…
The relevance of chaos to evolution is discussed in the context of the origin and maintenance of diversity and complexity. Evolution to the edge of chaos is demonstrated in an imitation game. As an origin of diversity, dynamic clustering of…
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…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
Genetic drift is stochastic fluctuations of alleles frequencies in a population due to sampling effects. We consider a model of drift in an equilibrium population, with high mutation rates: few functional mutations per generation. Such…
The "Kill the Winner" hypothesis is an attempt to address the problem of diversity in biology. It argues that host-specific predators control the population of each prey, preventing a winner from emerging and thus maintaining the…
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
Diversity, understood as the variety of different elements or configurations that an extensive system has, is a crucial property that allows maintaining the system's functionality in a changing environment, where failures, random events or…
A central goal in ecology is to understand how biodiversity is maintained. Previous theoretical works have employed the rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game as a toy model, demonstrating that population mobility is crucial in determining the…
The n-person Prisoner's Dilemma is a widely used model for populations where individuals interact in groups. The evolutionary stability of populations has been analysed in the literature for the case where mutations in the population may be…
Classical population genetics a priori assigns fitness to alleles without considering molecular or functional properties of proteins that these alleles encode. Here we study population dynamics in a model where fitness can be inferred from…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
A theoretical and experimental analysis is made of the effects of self-adaptation in a simple evolving system. Specifically, we consider the effects of coding the mutation and crossover probabilities of a genetic algorithm evolving in…
Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. Human history can be regarded as a sequence of long periods of cultural stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts that transform culture upside-down over the turn of a few…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
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…
Explaining biodiversity is a central focus in theoretical ecology. A significant obstacle arises from the Competitive Exclusion Principle (CEP), which states that two species competing for the same type of resources cannot coexist at…
We analyse a non-local parabolic integro-differential equation modelling the evolutionary dynamics of a phenotypically-structured population in a changing environment. Such models arise in a variety of contexts from climate change to…