Related papers: Information -sharing, adaptive epigenetics and hum…
Populations of replicating entities frequently experience sudden or cyclical changes in environment. We explore the implications of this phenomenon via a environmental switching parameter in several common evolutionary dynamics models…
Interactions among individuals in natural populations often occur in a dynamically changing environment. Understanding the role of environmental variation in population dynamics has long been a central topic in theoretical ecology and…
Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…
Information theory has explained the organization of many biological phenomena, from the physiology of sensory receptive fields to the variability of certain DNA sequence ensembles. Some scholars have proposed that information should…
During epidemic outbreaks, information dissemination enhances individual protection, while social institutions influence the transmission through measures like government interventions, media campaigns, and hospital resource allocation.…
Societal cognitive overload, driven by the deluge of information and complexity in the AI age, poses a critical challenge to human well-being and societal resilience. This paper argues that mitigating cognitive overload is not only…
This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, we develop a new information theory, in which it is not a coincidence that information and physical entropy share the same mathematical formula. It is an adaptation of mind to help search…
We are living longer in times of the biggest technological revolution humanity had ever seen before. Trying to understand how these two facts interact with each other, or more specifically, trying to maximise the benefits that new…
New cells are generated throughout life and integrate into the hippocampus via the process of adult neurogenesis. Epileptogenic brain injury induces many structural changes in the hippocampus, including the death of interneurons and altered…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…
Many biological processes have been the source of inspiration for heuristic methods that generate high-quality solutions to solve optimization and search problems. This thesis presents an epigenetic technique for Evolutionary Algorithms,…
Microbes thrive in diverse porous environments -- from soil and riverbeds to human lungs and cancer tissues -- spanning multiple scales and conditions. Short- to long-term fluctuations in local factors induce spatio-temporal…
The unprecedented size of the human population, along with its associated economic activities, have an ever increasing impact on global environments. Across the world, countries are concerned about the growing resource consumption and the…
People learn about opportunities and actions by observing the experiences of their friends. We model how homophily -- the tendency to associate with similar others -- affects both the endogenous quality and diversity of the information…
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…
The last few years have witnessed substantial progress in the field of embodied AI where artificial agents, mirroring biological counterparts, are now able to learn from interaction to accomplish complex tasks. Despite this success,…
Organisms and ecological groups accumulate evidence to make decisions. Classic experiments and theoretical studies have explored this process when the correct choice is fixed during each trial. However, we live in a constantly changing…
The widespread use of digital devices has raised growing concerns about its impact on sustained attention at the population level. In this work, we propose a minimal dynamical framework to describe the collective evolution of attention…
Human perceptual and cognitive abilities are limited resources. Today, in the age of cheap information --cheap to produce, to manipulate, to disseminate--, this cognitive bottleneck translates into hypercompetition for visibility among…
Living systems can be understood as organized entities that capture, transform, and reproduce information. Classical gene-centered models explain adaptation through frequency changes driven by differential fitness, yet they often overlook…