Related papers: The phenotypic expansion and its boundaries
Concerns about declining or ageing populations often centre on the fear that fewer people will translate to a weaker economy and lower living standards. But these fears are frequently based on oversimplified or misapplied interpretations of…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
Many socio-economic and biological processes can be modeled as systems of interacting individuals. The behaviour of such systems can be often described within game-theoretic models. In these lecture notes, we introduce fundamental concepts…
The present paper is devoted to the study of the long term dynamics of diffusion processes modelling a single species that experiences both demographic and environmental stochasticity. In our setting, the long term dynamics of the diffusion…
Professional team sports provide an excellent domain for studying the dynamics of social competitions. These games are constructed with simple, well-defined rules and payoffs that admit a high-dimensional set of possible actions and…
Competition between species and genotypes is a dominant factor in a variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Biological dynamics are typically highly stochastic, and therefore, analyzing a competitive system requires accounting for…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
Halfway between the experiment and the focus group, between the quiz and a game, we have experienced a new format to "focus" on sustainability and the fundamental laws of thermodynamics and its principles. Concepts as reversibility,…
The interaction of all mobile species with their environment hinges on their movement patterns: the places they visit and how frequently they go there. In human society, where the prevalent form of cohabitation is in cities, the highly…
The basic mechanics of evolution have been understood since Darwin. But debate continues over whether macroevolutionary phenomena are driven primary by the fitness structure of genotype space or by ecological interaction. In this paper we…
We suggest a natural approach that leads to a modification of classical quasispecies models and incorporates the possibility of population extinction in addition to growth. The resulting modified models are called open. Their essential…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
As a key energy challenge, we urgently require a better understanding of how growing urban populations interact with municipal energy systems and the resulting impact on energy demand across city neighborhoods, which are dense hubs of both…
In most professional sports, the structure of the environment is kept neutral so that scoring imbalances may be attributed to differences in team skill. It thus remains unknown what impact structural heterogeneities can have on scoring…
Models of population growth and extinction are an increasingly popular subject of study. However, consequences of stochasticity and noise in shaping distributions and outcomes are not sufficiently explored. Here we consider a distributed…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
Humans are routinely asked to evaluate the performance of other individuals, separating success from failure and affecting outcomes from science to education and sports. Yet, in many contexts, the metrics driving the human evaluation…
Most theories of evolutionary diversification are based on equilibrium assumptions: they are either based on optimality arguments involving static fitness landscapes, or they assume that populations first evolve to an equilibrium state…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
A numerical model of 100 m and 200 m world class sprinting performances is modified using standard hydrodynamic principles to include effects of air temperature, pressure, and humidity levels on aerodynamic drag. The magnitude of the…