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The solution space of genome-scale models of cellular metabolism provides a map between physically viable flux configurations and cellular metabolic phenotypes described, at the most basic level, by the corresponding growth rates. By…
Body mass is a major life history trait and provides a scale for all living processes of organisms. Unfortunately body mass cannot be easily measured for many species, because of the logistical difficulties involved in actually catching and…
The size distribution and orbital architecture of dust, grains, boulders, asteroids, and major planets during the giant branch phases of evolution dictate the preponderance and observability of the eventual debris, which have been found to…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
The evolution of planetary systems around white dwarfs is crucial to understanding the presence of planetary material in the atmospheres of white dwarfs. These systems uniquely probe exoplanetary compositions. Periodic signals in the…
We consider a continuum version of a previously introduced and numerically studied model of macroevolution (PRL 75, 2055, (1995)) in which agents evolve by an optimization process in a rugged fitness landscape and die due to their…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
Time series of cell size evolution in unicellular marine algae (division Haptophyta; Coccolithus lineage), covering 57 million years, are studied by a system of linear stochastic differential equations of hierarchical structure. The data…
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.…
Why, contrary to theoretical predictions, do marine microbe communities harbor tremendous phenotypic heterogeneity? How can so many marine microbe species competing in the same niche coexist? We discovered a unifying explanation for both…
Many mathematical frameworks of evolutionary game dynamics assume that the total population size is constant and that selection affects only the relative frequency of strategies. Here, we consider evolutionary game dynamics in an extended…
In the interest of conservation, the importance of having a large habitat available for a species is widely known. Here, we introduce a lattice-based model for a population and look at the importance of fluctuations as well as that of the…
Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…
A central question in developmental biology is how size and position are determined. The genetic code carries instructions on how to control these properties in order to regulate the pattern and morphology of structures in the developing…
We study the Tangled Nature model of macro evolution and demonstrate that the co-evolutionary dynamics produces an increasingly correlated core of well occupied types. At the same time the entire configuration of types becomes increasing…
We present a study of the hypothesis that white dwarfs undergo a spectral change from hydrogen- to helium-dominated atmospheres using a volume-limited photometric sample drawn from the $Gaia$ DR2 catalogue, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey…
Animal behavior is shaped by a myriad of mechanisms acting on a wide range of scales, which hampers quantitative reasoning and the identification of general principles. Here, we combine data analysis and theory to investigate the…
Allometric scaling is one of the most pervasive laws in biology. Its origin, however, is still a matter of dispute. Recent studies have established that maximum metabolic rate scales with an exponent larger than that found for basal…
The hydrogen isotopic (D/H) ratio reflects the global cycling and evolution of water on Earth as it fractionates through planetary processes. We model the water cycle taking seafloor hydrothermal alteration, chemical alteration of…