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Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
Multilevel selection is an important organizing principle that crucially underlies evolutionary processes from the emergence of cells to eusociality and the economics of nations. Previous studies on multilevel selection assumed that the…
The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of machine culture, culture mediated or generated by…
Different evolutionary models are known to make disparate predictions for the success of an invading mutant in some situations. For example, some evolutionary mechanics lead to amplification of selection in structured populations, while…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
Natural phenomenon of coevolution is the reciprocally induced evolutionary change between two or more species or population. Though this biological occurrence is a natural fact, there are only few attempts to use this as a simile in…
Nature features a plethora of extraordinary photonic architectures that have been optimized through natural evolution. While numerical optimization is increasingly and successfully used in photonics, it has yet to replicate any of these…
Direct reciprocity facilitates the evolution of cooperation when individuals interact repeatedly. Most previous studies on direct reciprocity implicitly assume compulsory interactions. Yet, interactions are often voluntary in human…
We propose a model to characterize how a diffusing population adapts under a time periodic selection, while its environment undergoes shifts and size changes, leading to significant differences with classical results on fixed domains. After…
In subdivided populations, migration acts together with selection and genetic drift and determines their evolution. Building up on a recently proposed method, which hinges on the emergence of a time scale separation between local and global…
Resolving the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning has been one of the central goals of modern ecology. Early debates about the relationship were finally resolved with the advent of a statistical partitioning scheme…
Researchers have proposed that the distinction between so-called "simple" and "complex" societies can be expressed by an increase in the number of levels at which functional organization, interaction, and thus selection, operate. In spite…
People tend to have their social interactions with members of their own community. Such group-structured interactions can have a profound impact on the behaviors that evolve. Group structure affects the way people cooperate, and how they…
Biological competition is widely believed to result in the evolution of selfish preferences. The related concept of the `homo economicus' is at the core of mainstream economics. However, there is also experimental and empirical evidence for…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
Clonal interference, competition between multiple co-occurring beneficial mutations, has a major role in adaptation of asexual populations. We provide a simple individual based stochastic model of clonal interference taking into account a…
Community structure is a typical property of many real-world networks, and has become a key to understand the dynamics of the networked systems. In these networks most nodes apparently lie in a community while there often exists a few nodes…
Having control over species abundances and community resilience is of great interest for experimental, agricultural, industrial and conservation purposes. Here, we theoretically explore the possibility of manipulating ecological communities…
Every now and then the cultural paradigm of a society changes. Human history can be regarded as a sequence of long periods of cultural stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts that transform culture upside-down over the turn of a few…
In this article, we review the different models and methods to understand and estimate correlated evolution within the same genome, individual or species. We describe correlated evolution among traits, among genetic components and finally…