Related papers: Friendship and Natural Selection
This article investigates the impact of user homophily on the social process of information diffusion in online social media. Over several decades, social scientists have been interested in the idea that similarity breeds connection:…
I examine a random network model where nodes are categorized by type and linking probabilities can differ across types. I show that as homophily increases (so that the probability to link to other nodes of the same type increases and the…
In many indigenous societies, people are categorised into several cultural groups, or clans, within which they believe to share ancestors. Clan attributions provide certain rules for marriage and descent. Such rules between clans constitute…
Understanding how genes interact and relate to each other is a fundamental question in biology. However, current practices for describing these relationships, such as drawing diagrams or graphs in a somewhat arbitrary manner, limit our…
We study mixing patterns in networks, meaning the propensity for nodes of different kinds to connect to one another. The phenomenon of assortative mixing, whereby nodes prefer to connect to others that are similar to themselves, has been…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
The advent of modern genome sequencing techniques allows for a more stringent test of the neutrality hypothesis of Darwinian evolution, where all individuals have the same fitness. Using the individual based model of Wright and Fisher, we…
A common sample descriptor in human genomics studies is that of 'genetic ancestry group', with terms such as 'European genetic ancestry' or 'East Asian genetic ancestry' frequently used in publications to describe the genetics of groups of…
Individual heterogeneity is a key characteristic of many real-world systems, from organisms to humans. However its role in determining the system's collective dynamics is typically not well understood. Here we study how individual…
Empirical studies are inconclusive about the underlying mechanisms that shape the interrelated dynamics of opinions and interpersonal attraction. There is strong evidence that others whom are liked have a positive influence on opinions and…
Eukaryote genomes contain excessively introns, inter-genic and other non-genic sequences that appear to have no vital functional role or phenotype manifestation. Their existence, a long-standing puzzle, is viewed from the principle of…
The genetic diversity of a species is shaped by its recent evolutionary history and can be used to infer demographic events or selective sweeps. Most inference methods are based on the null hypothesis that natural selection is a weak or…
We use a generalised version of the individual-based Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology to study the relationship between ecosystem structure and evolutionary history. Our evolved model ecosystems typically exhibit interaction…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
This paper shows that differentiating the lifetimes of two phenotypes independently from their fertility can lead to a qualitative change in the equilibrium of a population: since survival and reproduction are distinct functional aspects of…
We study how a behavior (an idea, buying a product, having a disease, adopting a cultural fad or a technology) spreads among agents in an a social network that exhibits segregation or homophily (the tendency of agents to associate with…
We consider a neutral haploid population whose generations are not overlapping and whose size is large and constantly of $N$ individuals. Any generation is replaced by a new one and any individual has a single parent. We do not choose the…
The start of a human's life can be characterized by two lotteries: that of your genes (nature) and the family you were born into (nurture). These set in motion a trajectory, from birth onward, in health and human capital. Leveraging three…
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…
Genome-wide association studies, in which as many as a million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) are measured on several thousand samples, are quickly becoming a common type of study for identifying genetic factors associated with many…