Related papers: Phenomenological approach for describing environme…
Comment on "Classification Scheme for Phenomenological Universalities in Growth Problems in Physics and Other Sciences" by P. Castorina, P. P. Delsanto and C. Guiot, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 96}, 188701 (2006) is presented. It has been proved…
In this communication, the approach of phenomenological universalities of growth are considered to describe the behaviour of a system showing oscillatory growth. Two phenomenological classes are proposed to consider the behaviour of a…
Biological entities are inherently dynamic. As such, various ecological disciplines use mathematical models to describe temporal evolution. Typically, growth curves are modelled as sigmoids, with the evolution modelled by ordinary…
Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…
Verhulst logistic curve either grows OR decays, depending on the {\it growth rate} parameter value. A similar situation is found in the Gompertz law about human mortality. However, growth can neither be infinite nor reach a finite steady…
A classification in universality classes of broad categories of phenomenologies, belonging to different disciplines, may be very useful for a crossfertilization among them and for the purpose of pattern recognition. We present here a simple…
Phenotypic evolution implies sequential fixations of new genomic sequences. The speed at which these mutations fixate depends, in part, on the relative fitness (selection coefficient) of the mutant vs. the ancestor. Using a simple…
In this communication, the incorrectness of phenomenological approach to the logistic growth equation, proposed by Castorina et al. is presented in detail. The correct phenomenological approach to logistic growth equation is also proposed…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Regardless of a system's complexity or scale, its growth can be considered to be a spontaneous thermodynamic response to a local convergence of down-gradient material flows. Here it is shown how growth can be constrained to a few distinct…
Context-dependent nature of biological phenomena are well documented in every branch of biology. While there have been few previous attempts to (implicitly) model various facets of biological context-dependence, a formal and general…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
Phenological timing -- i.e. the course of annually recurring development stages in nature -- is of particular interest since it can be understood as a proxy for the climate at a specific region; moreover changes in the so called…
We propose a new deterministic growth model which captures certain features of both the Gompertz and Korf laws. We investigate its main properties, with special attention to the correction factor, the relative growth rate, the inflection…
Biological organisms exhibit diverse strategies for adapting to varying environments. For example, a population of organisms may express the same phenotype in all environments (`unvarying strategy'), or follow environmental cues and express…
This work faces the problem of the origin of the logarithmic character of the Gompertzian growth. We show that the macroscopic, deterministic Gompertz equation describes the evolution from the initial state to the final stationary value of…
The growth of biological systems described by the Gompertz and West-Brown-Enquist functions is considered in the framework of the space-like supersymmetric quantum mechanics. It has been shown that the supersymmetric effect of a…
The growth function of populations is central in biomathematics. The main dogma is the existence of density dependence mechanisms, which can be modelled with distinct functional forms that depend on the size of the population. One important…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
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…