Related papers: Rate of Adaptive Evolution under Blending Inherita…
Genetic drift is stochastic fluctuations of alleles frequencies in a population due to sampling effects. We consider a model of drift in an equilibrium population, with high mutation rates: few functional mutations per generation. Such…
A model for the evolution of a finite population in a rugged fitness landscape is introduced and solved. The population is trapped in an evolutionary loop, alternating periods of stasis to periods in which it performs adaptive walks. The…
An interesting feature of growth in animals is that different parts of the body grow at approximately the same rate. This property is called proportionate growth. In this paper, we review our recent work on patterns formed by adding $N$…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
In exponentially proliferating populations of microbes, the population typically doubles at a rate less than the average doubling time of a single-cell due to variability at the single-cell level. It is known that the distribution of…
Resistance to insecticide is considered nowadays one of the major threats to insect control, as its occurrence reduces drastically the efficiency of chemical control campaigns, and may also perturb the application of other control methods,…
The genetic diversity of a species is shaped by its recent evolutionary history and can be used to infer demographic events or selective sweeps. Most inference methods are based on the null hypothesis that natural selection is a weak or…
The goal of this work is to analyze a model for the rate-independent evolution of sets with finite perimeter. The evolution of the admissible sets is driven by that of a given time-dependent set, which has to include the admissible sets and…
The biological theory of adaptive dynamics proposes a description of the long-term evolution of a structured asexual population. It is based on the assumptions of large population, rare mutations and small mutation steps, that lead to a…
We consider the hypothesis that Evolution promotes population-wide genome patterns that, under randomization, ensures the External Validity of adaptations across population members. An adaptation is Externally Valid (EV) if its effect holds…
Stronger selection implies faster evolution---that is, the greater the force, the faster the change. This apparently self-evident proposition, however, is derived under the assumption that genetic variation within a population is primarily…
Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
Complex adaptive systems have been the subject of much recent attention. It is by now well-established that members (`agents') tend to self-segregate into opposing groups characterized by extreme behavior. However, while different social…
The mutual relationship between evolution and learning is a controversial argument among the artificial intelligence and neuro-evolution communities. After more than three decades, there is still no common agreement on the matter. In this…
We show that, if truth assignments on $n$ variables reproduce through recombination so that satisfaction of a particular Boolean function confers a small evolutionary advantage, then a polynomially large population over polynomially many…
Growing evidence suggests that many vertebrate lineages are evolving at significantly different rates. As a first approximation of evolutionary rates, we assessed the amount of neutral (dS) and non-neutral (dN) substitutions that have…
We examine the dynamics of an age-structured population model in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of the parent. While the total population of the system always reaches a steady state, the…