Related papers: Neutral selection
Fat tailed statistics and power-laws are ubiquitous in many complex systems. Usually the appearance of of a few anomalously successful individuals (bio-species, investors, websites) is interpreted as reflecting some inherent "quality"…
An ongoing debate in ecology concerns the impacts of ecological drift and selection on community assembly. Here, we show that there is a sharp phase transition in diverse ecological communities between a selection dominated regime (the…
Modern developments in population dynamics emphasize the role of the turnover of individuals. In the new approaches stable population size is a dynamic equilibrium between different mortality and fecundity factors instead of an arbitrary…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
New automated and high-throughput methods allow the manipulation and selection of numerous bacterial populations. In this manuscript we are interested in the neutral diversity patterns that emerge from such a setup in which many bacterial…
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…
Theoretical ecology has traditionally equated persistence with the stability of a fixed equilibrium point. Here we argue that the primary threat to ecosystem persistence need not be the loss of stability, but instead the escape of the…
Speciation is the "elephant in the room" of community ecology. As the ultimate source of biodiversity, its integration in ecology's theoretical corpus is necessary to understand community assembly. Yet, speciation is often completely…
We introduce an individual-based model of a complex ecological community with random interactions. The model contains a large number of species, each with a finite population of individuals, subject to discrete reproduction and death…
In both natural and artificial studies, evolution is often seen as synonymous to natural selection. Individuals evolve under pressures set by environments that are either reset or do not carry over significant changes from previous…
We study the evolutionary dynamics of a phenotypically structured population in a changing environment , where the environmental conditions vary with a linear trend but in an oscillatory manner. Such phenomena can be described by parabolic…
Resource are often not uniformly distributed within a population. Spatial variations of concentration of a resource, change the fitness of competing strategies locally. The notion of fitness varying with respect to both genotype and…
Evolutionary systems must learn to generalize, often extrapolating from a limited set of selective conditions to anticipate future environmental changes. The mechanisms enabling such generalization remain poorly understood, despite their…
Population genetics models typically consider a fixed population size and a unique selection coefficient. However, population dynamics inherently generate noise in numbers of individuals and selection acts on various components of the…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
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…
This paper focuses on the maximum speed at which biological evolution can occur. I derive inequalities that limit the rate of evolutionary processes driven by natural selection, mutations, or genetic drift. These \emph{rate limits} link the…
Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…
We investigate the evolution of populations of random Boolean networks under selection for robustness of the dynamics with respect to the perturbation of the state of a node. The fitness landscape contains a huge plateau of maximum fitness…
In its simplest form, the competitive exclusion principle states that a number of species competing for a smaller number of resources cannot coexist. However, it has been observed empirically that in some settings it is possible to have…