Related papers: Is modularity the reason why recombination is so u…
Nature features a plethora of extraordinary photonic architectures that have been optimized through natural evolution. While numerical optimization is increasingly and successfully used in photonics, it has yet to replicate any of these…
We study the evolution of the network properties of a populated network embedded in a genotype space characterised by either a low or a high number of potential links, with particular emphasis on the connectivity and clustering. Evolution…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Mutation and recombination operators play a key role in determining the speed and quality of Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms (GEAs). Prior work has analyzed the effects of these operators on genotypic variation, often using locality…
Homophily, the tendency of individuals to connect with others who share similar attributes, is a defining feature of social networks. Understanding how groups interact, both within and across, is crucial for uncovering the dynamics of…
We study the stationary state of a population evolving under the action of random genetic drift, selection and recombination in which both deleterious and reverse beneficial mutations can occur. We find that the equilibrium fraction of…
This paper presents two different efficiency-enhancement techniques for probabilistic model building genetic algorithms. The first technique proposes the use of a mutation operator which performs local search in the sub-solution…
Modularity has been widely studied as a mechanism to improve the capabilities of neural networks through various techniques such as hand-crafted modular architectures and automatic approaches. While these methods have sometimes shown…
This paper suggests that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. With this explanation for the basic cycle, the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
Metabolism displays striking and robust regularities in the forms of modularity and hierarchy, whose composition may be compactly described. This renders metabolic architecture comprehensible as a system, and suggests the order in which…
We present a computational simulation of evolving entities that includes symbiosis with shifting levels of selection. Evolution by natural selection shifts from the level of the original entities to the level of the new symbiotic entity. In…
A variety of genome transformations can occur as a microbial population adapts to a large environmental change. In particular, genomic surveys indicate that, following the transition to an obligate, host-dependent symbiont, the density of…
Measures of biodiversity change such as the Living Planet Index describe proportional change in the abundance of a typical species, which can be thought of as change in the size of a community. Here, I discuss the orthogonal concept of…
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…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
Hyperbolic models are remarkably good at reproducing the scale-free, highly clustered and small-world properties of networks representing real complex systems in a very simple framework. Here we show that for the popularity-similarity…
When beneficial mutations are relatively common, competition between multiple unfixed mutations can reduce the rate of fixation in well-mixed asexual populations. We introduce a one dimensional model with a steady accumulation of beneficial…
Random Boolean networks have been used widely to explore aspects of gene regulatory networks. A modified form of the model through which to systematically explore the effects of increasing the number of gene states has previously been…
Mathematical models play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of biological experiments. Studies often present a model that generates the observations, connecting hypothesized process to an observed pattern. Such generative…