Related papers: Chaos and Unpredictability in Evolution
Chaotic dynamics is always characterized by swarms of unstable trajectories, unpredictable individually, and thus generally studied statistically. It is often the case that such phase-space densities relax exponentially fast to a limiting…
We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…
Phenotypic plasticity and its evolution may help evolutionary rescue in a novel and stressful environment, especially if environmental novelty reveals cryptic genetic variation that enables the evolution of increased plasticity. However,…
We provide evidence of an extreme form of sensitivity to initial conditions in a family of one-dimensional self-ruling dynamical systems. We prove that some hyperchaotic sequences are closed-form expressions of the orbits of these…
One of the properties that make ecological systems so unique is the range of complex behavioural patterns that can be exhibited by even the simplest communities with only a few species. Much of this complexity is commonly attributed to…
A macroscopic theory for describing cellular states during steady-growth is presented, which is based on the consistency between cellular growth and molecular replication, as well as the robustness of phenotypes against perturbations.…
The long-term behaviour of dynamic systems can be classified in two different regimes, regular or chaotic, depending on the values of the control parameters, which are kept constant during the time evolution. Starting from slightly…
Non-reciprocal interactions between microscopic constituents can profoundly shape the large-scale properties of complex systems. Here, we investigate the effects of non-reciprocity in the context of theoretical ecology by analyzing a…
The role of the selection pressure and mutation amplitude on the behavior of a single-species population evolving on a two-dimensional lattice, in a periodically changing environment, is studied both analytically and numerically. The…
The dynamics of a nonequilibrium system can become complex because the system has many components (e.g., a human brain), because the system is strongly driven from equilibrium (e.g., large Reynolds-number flows), or because the system…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
While quite a few recent papers have explored game-resource feedback using the framework of evolutionary game theory, almost all the studies are confined to using time-continuous dynamical equations. Moreover, in such literature, the effect…
A fundamental issue in nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics is how to distinguish chaotic from stochastic fluctuations in short experimental recordings. This dilemma underlies many complex systems models from stochastic gene…
The striking fractal geometry of strange attractors underscores the generative nature of chaos: like probability distributions, chaotic systems can be repeatedly measured to produce arbitrarily-detailed information about the underlying…
This article examines the subtle relationship between chaos and randomness, two concepts that, although they refer to seemingly unpredictable phenomenon, are based on fundamentally different principles. Chaos manifests in deterministic…
Chaos is widely understood as being a consequence of sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. This is the result of an instability in phase space, which separates trajectories exponentially. Here, we demonstrate that this criterion…
Developmental trajectories are known to be canalized, or robust to both environmental and genetic perturbations. However, even when these trajectories are decanalized by an environmental perturbation outside of the range of conditions to…
The composition of ecological communities varies not only between different locations but also in time. Understanding the fundamental processes that drive species towards rarity or abundance is crucial to assessing ecosystem resilience and…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…