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This paper investigates the dynamics of biomass in a marine ecosystem. A stochastic process is defined in which organisms undergo jumps in body size as they catch and eat smaller organisms. Using a systematic expansion of the master…
The thermoregulation system in animals removes body heat in hot temperatures and retains body heat in cold temperatures. The better the animal removes heat, the worse the animal retains heat and visa versa. It is the balance between these…
A number of authors have in recent years proposed that the processes of macroevolution may give rise to self-organized critical phenomena which could have a significant effect on the dynamics of ecosystems. In particular it has been…
Although Turing pattern is one of the most universal mechanisms for pattern formation, in its standard model the number of stripes changes with the system size, since the wavelength of the pattern is invariant: It fails to preserve the…
A simple model of macroevolution is proposed exhibiting both the property of punctuated equilibrium and the dynamics of potentialities for different species to evolve towards increasingly higher complexity. It is based on the phenomenon of…
One of the most fundamental rules in metabolic ecology is the allometric equation, which is a power-law scaling that describes the connection between body measurements and body size. The biological dynamics of this essentially empirical…
It is usually believed that Darwin's theory leads to a smooth gradual evolution, so that mass extinctions must be caused by external shocks. However, it has recently been argued that mass extinctions arise from the intrinsic dynamics of…
Residential mobility is deeply entangled with all aspects of hunter-gatherer life ways, and is therefore an issue of central importance in hunter-gatherer studies. Hunter-gatherers vary widely in annual rates of residential mobility, and…
A new approach to understanding evolution [Val09], namely viewing it through the lens of computation, has already started yielding new insights, e.g., natural selection under sexual reproduction can be interpreted as the Multiplicative…
Recent observations show that the white dwarfs (WDs) in cataclysmic Variables (CVs) have an average mass significantly higher than isolated WDs and WDs in post-common envelope binaries (PCEBs), which are thought to the progenitors of CVs.…
The ongoing discovery of terrestrial exoplanets accentuates the importance of studying planetary evolution for a wide range of initial conditions. We perform thermal evolution simulations for generic terrestrial planets with masses ranging…
Building upon the eco-evolutionary game dynamics framework established by Tilman et al., we investigate stochastic fluctuations in a two-strategy system incorporating environmental feedback mechanisms, where the payoff matrix exhibits…
[abridged] We study the dependence of the galaxy size evolution on morphology, stellar mass and large scale environment for a sample of 298 group and 384 field quiescent early-type galaxies from the COSMOS survey, selected from z~1 to the…
On rugged fitness landscapes where sign epistasis is common, adaptation can often involve either individually beneficial "uphill" mutations or more complex mutational trajectories involving fitness valleys or plateaus. The dynamics of the…
Salamanders (urodela) have among the largest vertebrate genomes, ranging in size from 10 to over 80 pg. The urodela are divided into ten extant families each with a characteristic range in genome size. Although changes in genome size often…
The evolutionary transition to multicellularity transformed life on earth, allowing for the evolution of large, complex organisms. While multicellularity can be strongly advantageous, its earliest stages bring unique physical challenges.…
Is evolution always gradual or can it make leaps? We examine a mathematical model of an evolutionary process on a fitness landscape and obtain analytic solutions for the probability of multi-mutation leaps, that is, several mutations…
The observed general time-asymmetric behavior of macroscopic systems -- embodied in the second law of thermodynamics -- arises naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws due to the great disparity between macro and micro-scales. More…
A general theory of thermodynamically consistent biomechanical--biochemical growth in a body, considering mass addition in the bulk and at an incoherent interface, is developed. The incoherency arises due to incompatibility of growth and…
One of the major characteristics of living organisms is metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy produced per unit of time. When the mass of organisms increases, the metabolic rate also increases (usually as a power function of mass),…