Related papers: Simple model for the Darwinian transition in early…
Evolutionary graph theory is a well established framework for modelling the evolution of social behaviours in structured populations. An emerging consensus in this field is that graphs that exhibit heterogeneity in the number of connections…
Cooperation is observed widely in nature and is thought an essential component of many evolutionary processes, yet the mechanisms by which it arises and persists are still unclear. Among several theories, network reciprocity -- a model of…
We are interested in the impact of natural selection in a prey-predator community. We introduce an individual-based model of the community that takes into account both prey and predator phenotypes. Our aim is to understand the phenotypic…
Motivated by modeling the dynamics of a population living in a flowing medium where the environmental factors are random in space, we have studied an asymmetric variant of the one-dimensional contact process, where the quenched random…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
We consider stochastic dynamics of a population which starts from a small colony on a habitat with large but limited carrying capacity. A common heuristics suggests that such population grows initially as a Galton-Watson branching process…
We propose a class of evolutionary models that involves an arbitrary exchangeable process as the breeding process and different selection schemes. In those models, a new genome is born according to the breeding process, and then a genome is…
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are…
The process of speciation, where an ancestral species divides in two or more new species, involves several geographic, environmental and genetic components that interact in a complex way. Understanding all these elements at once is…
These lectures contain a brief description of evolutionary models inspired by the statistical mechanics of disordered systems. After an introduction describing the Darwinian paradigm of evolving populations, the deterministic quasispecies…
Animal grouping behaviors have been widely studied due to their implications for understanding social intelligence, collective cognition, and potential applications in engineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics. An important…
The ways in which natural selection can allow the proliferation of cooperative behavior have long been seen as a central problem in evolutionary biology. Most of the literature has focused on interactions between pairs of individuals and on…
Macroevolutionary dynamics often display sudden, explosive surges, where systems remain relatively stable for extended periods before experiencing dramatic acceleration that frequently exceeds traditional exponential growth. This pattern is…
Studies of transient dynamics captures the time history of any dramatic changes in the dynamics of a system. The transient dynamics is investigated here in a classic ecological model of a bistable tri-trophic food chain. All the species in…
Evolution of beliefs of a society are a product of interactions between people (horizontal transmission) in the society over generations (vertical transmission). Researchers have studied both horizontal and vertical transmission separately.…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
We introduce a model, based on the Evolutionary Game Theory, for studying the dynamics of group formation. The latter constitutes a relevant phenomenon observed in different animal species, whose individuals tend to cluster together forming…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
One of the leading theories for the origin of life includes the hypothesis according to which life would have evolved as cooperative networks of molecules. Explaining cooperation$-$and particularly, its emergence in favoring the evolution…
Homophily and social influence are the fundamental mechanisms that drive the evolution of attitudes, beliefs and behaviour within social groups. Homophily relates the similarity between pairs of individuals' attitudinal states to their…