Related papers: The remarkable discreteness of being
Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…
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…
Many systems in nature, from ferromagnets to flocks of birds, exhibit ordering phenomena on the large scale. In physical systems order is statistically robust for large enough dimensions, with relative fluctuations due to noise vanishing…
The spatio-temporal dynamics of a population present one of the most fascinating aspects and challenges for ecological modelling. In this article we review some simple mathematical models, based on one dimensional…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
If one isolated species is supposed to evolve following the logistic mapping, then we are tempted to think that the dynamics of two species can be expressed by a coupled system of two discrete logistic equations. As three basic…
Understanding the evolution of cooperation is pivotal in biology and social science. Public resources sharing is a common scenario in the real world. In our study, we explore the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation on a regular graph with…
An elementary biostatistical theory based on a selectivity-variability principle is proposed to address a question raised by Charles Darwin, namely, how one sex of a sexually dimorphic species might tend to evolve with greater variability…
Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs,…
We study how environmental stochasticity influences the long-term population size in certain one- and two-species models. The difficulty is that even when one can prove that there is persistence, it is usually impossible to say anything…
The physical processes that determine the properties of our everyday world, and of the wider cosmos, are determined by some key numbers: the 'constants' of micro-physics and the parameters that describe the expanding universe in which we…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…
Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…
Surprise describes a range of phenomena from unexpected events to behavioral responses. We propose a measure of surprise and use it for surprise-driven learning. Our surprise measure takes into account data likelihood as well as the degree…
To study the dynamics of chemical processes, we often adopt rate equations to observe the change in chemical concentrations. However, when the number of the molecules is small, the fluctuations cannot be neglected. We often study the…
In this paper, we study the significance of ecological interactions and separation of birth and death dynamics in stochastic heterogeneous populations via general birth-death processes. Interactions can manifest through the birth dynamics,…
Aging is a universal consequence of life, yet researchers have identified no universal theme. This manuscript considers aging from the perspective of entropy, wherein things fall apart. We first examine biological information change as a…
Empirical observations in marine ecosystems have suggested a balance of biological and advection time scales as a possible explanation of species coexistence. To characterise this scenario, we measure the time to fixation in neutrally…
We develop a ``unified'' model that describes both ``micro'' and ``macro'' evolutions within a single theoretical framework. The eco-system is described as a dynamic network; the population dynamics at each node of this network describes…