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The practice of evolutionary algorithms involves the tuning of many parameters. How big should the population be? How many generations should the algorithm run? What is the (tournament selection) tournament size? What probabilities should…
Sex chromosomes have independently evolved in species with separate sexes in most lineages across the tree of life. However, the well-accepted canonical model of sex chromosome evolution is not universally supported. There is no single…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
How multicellular life forms evolved out from unicellular ones constitutes a major problem in our understanding of the evolution of our biosphere. A recent set of experiments involving yeast cell populations has shown that selection for…
Single-cell experiments revealed substantial variability in generation times, growth rates but also in birth and division sizes between genetically identical cells. Understanding how these fluctuations determine the fitness of the…
Mechanisms leading to speciation are a major focus in evolutionary biology. In this paper, we present and study a stochastic model of population where individuals, with type a or A, are equivalent from ecological, demographical and spatial…
According to the universally accepted concept of the development of life on the Earth, multicellular organisms initially emerged as a result of either the union of identical unicellular organisms with the following functional…
Background: Advanced biological techniques have helped produce more insightful findings on the genetic etiology of infertility that may lead to better management of the condition. This review provides an update on genes predisposing to…
Using a bit-string model of evolution, we find a successful route to diploidy and sex in simple organisms. Allowing the sexually reproducing diploid individuals to also perform mitosis, as they do in a haploid-diploid cycle, leads to the…
How cells regulate the number of organelles is a fundamental question in cell biology. While decades of experimental work have uncovered four fundamental processes that regulate organelle biogenesis, namely, de novo synthesis, fission,…
Sperm swimming is crucial to fertilise the egg, in nature and in assisted reproductive technologies. Modelling the sperm dynamics involves elasticity, hydrodynamics, internal active forces, and out-of-equilibrium noise. Here we demonstrate…
How cooperation emerges in human societies is still a puzzle. Evolutionary game theory has been the standard framework to address this issue. In most models, every individual plays with all others, and then reproduce and die according to…
It has been a puzzling question why some organisms reproduce sexually. Fisher and Muller hypothesized that reproducing by sex can speed up the evolution. They explained that in the sexual reproduction, recombination can combine beneficial…
Open-ended evolutionary dynamics remains an elusive goal for artificial evolutionary systems. Many ideas exist in the biological literature beyond the basic Darwinian requirements of variation, differential reproduction and inheritance. I…
Cellular heterogeneity is an immanent property of biological systems that covers very different aspects of life ranging from genetic diversity to cell-to-cell variability driven by stochastic molecular interactions, and noise induced cell…
The nearby, young, extinction-free {\sigma} Orionis cluster is acknowledged as a cornerstone for studying the stellar and substellar formation and evolution, especially at very low masses. However, the relatively limited knowledge of…
Dispersal is ubiquitous throughout the tree of life: factors selecting for dispersal include kin competition, inbreeding avoidance and spatiotemporal variation in resources or habitat suitability. These factors differ in whether they…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…
We describe an efficient algorithm for determining exactly the minimum number of sires consistent with the multi-locus genotypes of a mother and her progeny. We consider cases where a simple exhaustive search through all possible sets of…
This paper develops a simplified set of models describing asexual and sexual replication in unicel- lular diploid organisms. The models assume organisms whose genomes consist of two chromosomes, where each chromosome is assumed to be…