Related papers: Evolution: Life has Evolved to Evolve
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…
We explore the connection between evolution and large-deviation theory. To do so, we study evolutionary dynamics in which individuals experience mutations, reproduction, and selection using variants of the Moran model. We show that, in the…
Natural selection successfully explains how organisms accumulate adaptive change despite that traits acquired over a lifetime are eliminated at the end of each generation. However, in some domains that exhibit cumulative, adaptive change --…
A review of the mechanisms of speciation is performed. The mechanisms of the evolution of species, taking into account the feedback of the state of the environment and mechanisms of the emergence of complexity, are considered. It is shown…
We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…
We introduce the concept of an abstract evolution system, which provides a convenient framework for studying generic mathematical structures and their properties. Roughly speaking, an evolution system is a category endowed with a selected…
Genetic redundancy is ubiquitous and can be found in any organism. However, it has been argued that genetic redundancy reduces total population fitness, and therefore, redundancy is unlikely to evolve. In this letter, we study an…
A class of models for large-scale evolution and mass extinctions is presented. These models incorporate environmental changes on all scales, from influences on a single species to global effects. This is a step towards a unified picture of…
Darwin introduced the concept of the "living fossil" to describe species belonging to lineages that have experienced little evolutionary change, and suggested that species in more slowly evolving lineages are more prone to extinction (1).…
A series of results of evolution supervised by genetic algorithms with interest to agricultural and horticultural fields are reviewed. New obtained original results from the use of genetic algorithms on structure-activity relationships are…
Many biological functions are executed by molecular machines, which consume energy and convert it into mechanical work. Biological machines have evolved to transport cargo, facilitate folding of proteins and RNA, remodel chromatin and…
Anthropogenic changes of the biota and human hyper-dominance are modulating the evolution of life on our planet. Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, and has already modified uncountable…
The ambitious and ultimate research purpose in Systems Biology is the understanding and modelling of the cell's system. Although a vast number of models have been developed in order to extract biological knowledge from complex systems…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
Aging is a fundamental aspect of living systems that undergo a progressive deterioration of physiological function with age and an increase of vulnerability to disease and death. Living systems, known as complex systems, require complexity…
The effects of the evolution force are observable in nature at all structural levels ranging from small molecular systems to conversely enormous biospheric systems. However, the evolution force and work associated with formation of…
A major goal of molecular evolutionary biology is to identify loci or regions of the genome under selection versus those evolving in a neutral manner. Correct identification allows accurate inference of the evolutionary process and thus…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
Engineering the entire genome of an organism enables large-scale changes in organization, function, and external interactions, with significant implications for industry, medicine, and the environment. Improvements to DNA synthesis and…