Related papers: The deleterious mutation load is insensitive to re…
The entanglement of population dynamics, evolution, and adaptive radiation for species competing for resources is studied. For resource harvesting, we modify the model used in Ref. Phys. Rev. Lett. 118 048103 and introduce new resource…
We follow up on a companion work that considered growth rates of populations growing at different sites, with different randomly varying growth rates at each site, in the limit as migration between sites goes to 0. We extend this work here…
Evolutionary game theory has traditionally employed deterministic models to describe population dynamics. These models, due to their inherent nonlinearities, can exhibit deterministic chaos, where population fluctuations follow complex,…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…
How individuals adapt their behavior in cultural evolution remains elusive. Theoretical studies have shown that the update rules chosen to model individual decision making can dramatically modify the evolutionary outcome of the population…
Due to stochastic fluctuations arising from finite population size, known as genetic drift, the ability of a population to explore a rugged fitness landscape depends on its size. In the weak mutation regime, while the mean steady-state…
We study the effects of demographic stochasticity on the long-term dynamics of biological coevolution models of community assembly. The noise is induced in order to check the validity of deterministic population dynamics. While mutualistic…
Gene drive alleles bias their own inheritance to offspring. They can fix in a wild-type population in spite of a fitness cost, and even lead to the eradication of the target population if the fitness cost is high. However, this outcome may…
We study the accumulation of deleterious mutations in a haploid, asexually reproducing population, using analytical models and computer simulations. We find that Muller's ratchet can come to a halt in small populations as a consequence of a…
We study the dynamics of a population subject to selective pressures, evolving either on RNA neutral networks or in toy fitness landscapes. We discuss the spread and the neutrality of the population in the steady state. Different limits…
A steady influx of a single deleterious multilocus genotype will impose genetic load on the resident population and leave multiple descendants carrying various numbers of the foreign alleles. Provided that the foreign types are rare at…
Forest-fire and avalanche models support the notion that frequent catastrophes prevent the growth of very large populations and as such prevent rare large-scale catastrophes. We show that this notion is not universal. A new model class…
Understanding the temporal spread of gene drive alleles -- alleles that bias their own transmission -- through modeling is essential before any field experiments. In this paper, we present a deterministic reaction-diffusion model describing…
In many biological processes, the size of a population changes stochastically with time, and recent work in the context of cancer and bacterial growth have focused on the situation when the mean population size grows exponentially. Here,…
We study the evolution of large but finite asexual populations evolving in fitness landscapes in which all mutations are either neutral or strongly deleterious. We demonstrate that despite the absence of higher fitness genotypes, adaptation…
Most population models assume that individuals within a given population are identical, that is, the fundamental role of variation is ignored. Here we develop a general approach to modeling heterogeneous populations with discrete…
Urbanization promotes economy, mobility, access and availability of resources, but on the other hand, generates higher levels of pollution, violence, crime, and mental distress. The health consequences of the agglomeration of people living…
Understanding if and how mutants reach fixation in populations is an important question in evolutionary biology. We study the impact of population growth has on the success of mutants. To systematically understand the effects of growth we…
The origin of altruistic behavior, i.e. the behavior that is useful for a population or a species but goes at the expense of an altruistic individual, has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with…
Is there an advantage to heterogeneity in a population where individuals grow and divide by fission? This is a broad question, to which there is no easy universal answer. This article aims to provide a quantitative answer in the specific…