Related papers: Is modularity the reason why recombination is so u…
The symbiotic branching model describes the dynamics of a spatial two-type population, where locally particles branch at a rate given by the frequency of the other type combined with nearest-neighbour migration. This model generalizes…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
People tend to have their social interactions with members of their own community. Such group-structured interactions can have a profound impact on the behaviors that evolve. Group structure affects the way people cooperate, and how they…
The growth function of populations is central in biomathematics. The main dogma is the existence of density dependence mechanisms, which can be modelled with distinct functional forms that depend on the size of the population. One important…
Sexual reproduction is not always synonymous with the existence of two morphologically different sexes; isogamous species produce sex cells of equal size, typically falling into multiple distinct self-incompatible classes, termed mating…
Occupancy models are used in statistical ecology to estimate species dispersion. The two components of an occupancy model are the detection and occupancy probabilities, with the main interest being in the occupancy probabilities. We show…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
People tend to align their use of language to the linguistic behaviour of their own ingroup and to simultaneously diverge from the language use of outgroups. This paper proposes to model this phenomenon of sociolinguistic identity…
Biological systems exhibit two structural features on many levels of organization: sparseness, in which only a small fraction of possible interactions between components actually occur; and modularity - the near decomposability of the…
Motivated by observations in sequence data of herpesviruses, we introduce a multi-locus model for the joint evolution of different genotypes in a virus population that is distributed across a population of hosts. In the model, virus…
Wagner's modularity inducing problem domain is a key contribution to the study of the evolution of modularity, including both evolutionary theory and evolutionary computation. We study its behavior under classical genetic algorithms. Unlike…
Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…
Recombination is introduced into Eigen's theory of quasispecies evolution. Comparing numerical simulations of the rate equations in the non-recombining and recombining cases show that recombination has a strong effect on the error threshold…
The concept of fitness is introduced, and a simple derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (which states that the average fitness of a population increases if its variance is nonzero) is given. After a short discussion of…
Sexual reproduction in Nature requires two sexes, which raises the question why the reproductive scheme did not evolve to have three or more sexes. Here we construct a constrained optimization model based on the communication theory to…
We study self-replicating molecules under externally varying conditions. Changing conditions such as temperature variations and/or alterations in the environment's resource composition lead to both non-constant replication and decay rates…
This paper develops mathematical models describing the evolutionary dynamics of both asexually and sexually reproducing populations of diploid unicellular organisms. We consider two forms of genome organization. In one case, we assume that…
A mutualism is an interaction where the involved species benefit from each other. We study a two-dimensional hexagonal three-state cellular automaton model of a two-species mutualistic system. The simple model is characterized by four…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…