Related papers: Mutation Rules and the Evolution of Sparseness and…

Mutualistic interactions, which are beneficial for both interacting species, are recurrently present in ecosystems. Observations of natural systems showed that, if we draw mutualistic relationships as binary links between species, the…

Mutation rate is a key determinant of the pace as well as outcome of evolution, and variability in this rate has been shown in different scenarios to play a key role in evolutionary adaptation and resistance evolution under stress caused by…

Diverse biological networks exhibit universal features distinguished from those of random networks, calling much attention to their origins and implications. Here we propose a minimal evolution model of Boolean regulatory networks, which…

Biological systems, unlike physical or chemical systems, are characterized by the very inhomogeneous distribution of their components. The immune system, in particular, is notable for self-organizing its structure. Classically, the dynamics…

Previous work has shown that species interacting in an ecosystem and actors transacting in an economic context may have notable similarities in behavior. However, the specific mechanism that may underlie similarities in nature and human…

The rate of adoption of new information depends on reinforcement from multiple sources in a way that often cannot be described by simple contagion processes. In such cases, contagion is said to be complex. Complex contagion happens in the…

Why do biological and artificial neurons sometimes modularise, each encoding a single meaningful variable, and sometimes entangle their representation of many variables? In this work, we develop a theory of when biologically inspired…

Many complex adaptive systems contain a large diversity of specialized components. The specialization at the level of the microscopic degrees of freedom, and diversity at the level of the system as a whole are phenomena that appear during…

Computer modelling for evolutionary systems consists in: 1) to store in the memory the individual features of each member of a large population; and 2) to update the whole system repeatedly, as time goes by, according to some prescribed…

All biological systems are subject to perturbations: due to thermal fluctuations, external environments, or mutations. Yet, while biological systems are composed of thousands of interacting components, recent high-throughput experiments…

Clusters appear in nature in a diversity of contexts, involving distances as long as the cosmological ones, and down to atoms and molecules and the very small nuclear size. They also appear in several other scenarios, in particular in…

Biologists and physicists have a rich tradition of modeling living systems with simple models composed of a few interacting components. Despite the remarkable success of this approach, it remains unclear how to use such finely tuned models…

The importance of microscopic details on cooperation level is an intensively studied aspect of evolutionary game theory. Interestingly, these details become crucial on heterogeneous populations where individuals may possess diverse traits.…

The functional consequences of local and global dynamics can be very different in natural systems. Many such systems have a network description that exhibits strong local clustering as well as high communication efficiency, often termed as…

Evolutionary analyses of large populations commonly incorporate stochasticity through temporal variation in selection while treating genetic transmission as fixed. Much less attention has been given to stochasticity in transmission itself.…

Establishing a quantitative connection between the population growth rate and the generation times of single cells is a prerequisite for understanding evolutionary dynamics of microbes. However, existing theories fail to account for the…

Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…

The reward system is one of the fundamental drivers of animal behaviors and is critical for survival and reproduction. Despite its importance, the problem of how the reward system has evolved is underexplored. In this paper, we try to…

Adaptive control in biological systems, such as intestinal immunity, remains poorly understood despite detailed knowledge of underlying regulatory networks. We propose an alternative framework based on stochastic martingale turnover, in…

Phenotype of biological systems needs to be robust against mutation in order to sustain themselves between generations. On the other hand, phenotype of an individual also needs to be robust against fluctuations of both internal and external…