Related papers: An Adaptive Threshold in Mammalian Neocortical Evo…
Developmental bias plays a major role in phenotypic evolution. Some researchers have argued that phenotypes, regulated by development, can only evolve along restricted trajectory under certain scenarios, such as the case for mammalian molar…
Evolution by Natural Selection is a process by which progeny inherit some properties from their progenitors with small variation. These properties are subject to Natural Selection and are called adaptive traits and carriers of the latter…
The human connectome represents a network map of the brain's wiring diagram and the pattern into which its connections are organized is thought to play an important role in cognitive function. The generative rules that shape the topology of…
The ongoing explosion of genome sequence data is transforming how we reconstruct and understand the histories of biological systems. Across biological scales, from individual cells to populations and species, trees-based models provide a…
Horizontal gene transfer is an important factor in bacterial evolution that can act across species boundaries. Yet, we know little about rate and genomic targets of cross-lineage gene transfer, and about its effects on the recipient…
The formation of neuron networks is a process of fundamental importance for understanding the development of the nervous system and for creating biomimetic devices for tissue engineering and neural repair. The basic process that controls…
The cerebrum of mammals spans a vast range of sizes and yet has a very regular structure. The amount of folding of the cortical surface and the proportion of white matter gradually increase with size, but the underlying mechanisms remain…
Grid cells, discovered more than a decade ago [5], are neurons in the brain of mammals that fire when the animal is located near certain specific points in its familiar terrain. Intriguingly, these points form, for a single cell, a…
Although extensive behavioral changes often exist between closely related animal species, our understanding of the genetic basis underlying the evolution of behavior has remained limited. Here, we propose a new framework to study behavioral…
Neural codes appear efficient. Naturally, neuroscientists contend that an efficient process is responsible for generating efficient codes. They argue that natural selection is the efficient process that generates those codes. Although…
Reinforcement learning (RL) enables adaptive behavior across species via reward prediction errors (RPEs), but the neural origins of species-specific adaptability remain unknown. Integrating RL modeling, transcriptomics, and neuroimaging…
We are interested in modelling Darwinian evolution, resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. Our models are rooted in the microscopic, stochastic description of a population…
Developmental constraints have been postulated to limit the space of feasible phenotypes and thus shape animal evolution. These constraints have been suggested to be the strongest during either early or mid-embryogenesis, which corresponds…
We study a version of the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology redefined in a phenotype space where mutants have properties correlated to their parents. The model has individual-based dynamics whilst incorporating species scale…
Rapid anthropogenic environmental changes, including those due to habitat contamination, degradation, and climate change, have far-reaching effects on biological systems that may outpace animals' adaptive responses (Radchuk et al., 2019).…
Recent microbial experiments suggest that enhanced genetic drift at the frontier of a two-dimensional range expansion can cause genetic sectoring patterns with fractal domain boundaries. Here, we propose and analyze a simple model of…
Intelligence is often discussed in terms of neural networks in the cerebral cortex, whose evolution has presumably been influenced by Darwinian selection. Here we present molecular evidence that one of the many kinesin motors, Kif14, has…
Despite differences in brain sizes and cognitive niches among mammals, their cerebral cortices posses many common features and regularities. These regularities have been a subject of experimental investigation in neuroanatomy for the last…
Divergence time estimation requires the reconciliation of two major sources of data. These are fossil and/or biogeographic evidence that give estimates of the absolute age of nodes (ancestors) and molecular estimates that give us estimates…
The co-evolution of structure and dynamics, known as adaptivity, is a fundamental property in various systems and drives diverse emergent behaviors. However, the adaptivity in previous works is primarily stemmed from pairwise situations,…