Related papers: Stephenson et al.'s ecological fallacy
Understanding the main determinants of species coexistence across space and time is a central question in ecology. However, ecologists still know little about the scales and conditions at which biotic interactions matter and how these…
Estimating phylogenetic trees is an important problem in evolutionary biology, environmental policy and medicine. Although trees are estimated, their uncertainties are discarded by mathematicians working in tree space. Here we explicitly…
Constraints on changes in expression levels across all cell components imposed by the steady growth of cells have recently been discussed both experimentally and theoretically. By assuming a small environmental perturbation and considering…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking plays a fundamental role in many areas of condensed matter and particle physics. A fundamental problem in ecology is the elucidation of the mechanisms responsible for biodiversity and stability. Neutral theory,…
Scaling laws illuminate Nature's fundamental biological principles and guide bioinspired materials and structural designs. In simple cases they are based on the fundamental principle that all laws of nature remain unchanged (i.e.,…
Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used…
Many organisms exhibit branching morphologies that twist around each other and become entangled. Entanglement occurs when different objects interlock, creating complex and often irreversible configurations. This physical phenomenon is…
The reconstruction of a central tendency `species tree' from a large number of conflicting gene trees is a central problem in systematic biology. Moreover, it becomes particularly problematic when taxon coverage is patchy, so that not all…
We consider a class of density-dependent branching processes which generalises exponential, logistic and Gompertz growth. A population begins with a single individual, grows exponentially initially, and then growth may slow down as the…
We study the statistical underpinnings of life. We question some common assumptions about the thermodynamics of life and illustrate how, contrary to widespread belief, even in a closed system entropy growth can accompany an increase in…
Due to climate change, overgrazing, and deforestation, arid ecosystems are vulnerable to desertification and land degradation. As aridity increases, vegetation cover loses spatial homogeneity and self-organizes into heterogeneous vegetation…
Within the framework of the scalar-tensor theory we consider a hill-climbing inflation, in which the effective Planck mass increases in time. We obtain the Einstein frame potential with infinitely long and flat plateau as we approach…
Tropical rainforests exhibit a rich repertoire of spatial patterns emerging from the intricate relationship between the microscopic interaction between species. In particular, the distribution of vegetation clusters can shed much light on…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
We discuss the problem of observation of natural similarity in skeletal evolution of terrestrial mammals. Analysis is given by means of testing of the power scaling laws established in long bone allometry, which describe development of…
This paper introduces a new combinatorial framework for modeling the growth of binary trees through a discrete evolution process that incorporates a growing rule and an extinction rule. Building upon the theory of increasingly labeled…
Building upon the eco-evolutionary game dynamics framework established by Tilman et al., we investigate stochastic fluctuations in a two-strategy system incorporating environmental feedback mechanisms, where the payoff matrix exhibits…
Consider a branching process with a homogeneous reproduction law. Sampling a single cell uniformly from the population at a time $T > 0$ and looking along the sampled cell's ancestral lineage, we find that the reproduction law is…
Predicting the growth of large cracks in brittle materials is a fundamental unresolved problem in fracture mechanics. Under out-of-plane shear loading, an initially planar crack may fragment into multiple cracks, forming an echelon crack…
We continue to study (see arXiv:2401.08618, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.08618) a renewal equation $\phi(t)=\frak F\phi_t$ proposed in [C. Barril et al., J. Math. Biology, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00285-024-02084-x] to model trees…