Related papers: Community-level cohesion without cooperation
The network concept is increasingly used for the description of complex systems. Here we summarize key aspects of the evolvability and robustness of the hierarchical network-set of macromolecules, cells, organisms, and ecosystems. Listing…
Ecological communities with many species can be classified into dynamical phases. In systems with all-to-all interactions, a phase where a fixed point is always reached and a dynamically-fluctuating phase have been found. The dynamics when…
Over the last decade, significant progress has been made in understanding complex biological systems, however there have been few attempts at incorporating this knowledge into nature inspired optimization algorithms. In this paper, we…
Assembling optimal microbial communities is key for various applications in biofuel production, agriculture, and human health. Finding the optimal community is challenging because the number of possible communities grows exponentially with…
Trait variation and similarity among coexisting species can provide a window into the mechanisms that maintain their coexistence. Recent theoretical explorations suggest that competitive interactions will lead to groups, or clusters, of…
Collective behavior is commonly attributed to direct interactions among system components. Using a minimal stochastic model, we show that higher-order collective structure can instead emerge from shared stochastic environments, even in the…
Cooperation plays a fundamental role in societal and biological domains, and the population structure profoundly shapes the dynamics of evolution. Practically, individuals behave either altruistically or egoistically in multiple groups,…
We introduce the Webworld model, which links together the ecological modelling of food web structure with the evolutionary modelling of speciation and extinction events. The model describes dynamics of ecological communities on an…
Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…
A fundamental problem in community ecology is to understand how ecological processes such as selection, drift, and immigration give rise to observed patterns in species composition and diversity. Here, we present a simple, analytically…
Explaining how competing species coexist remains a central question in ecology. The well-known competitive exclusion principle (CEP) states that two species competing for the same resource cannot stably coexist, and more generally, that the…
Explaining biodiversity in nature is a fundamental problem in ecology. An outstanding challenge is embodied in the so-called Competitive Exclusion Principle: two species competing for one limiting resource cannot coexist at constant…
Recent empirical studies suggest that heavy-tailed distributions of human activities are universal in real social dynamics [Muchnik, \emph{et al.}, Sci. Rep. \textbf{3}, 1783 (2013)]. On the other hand, community structure is ubiquitous in…
Using methods from evolutionary game theory, this paper investigates the difference between social cohesion and task cohesion in promoting the evolution of cooperation in group interactions. Players engage in public goods games and are…
Evolutionary dynamics can be studied in well-mixed or structured populations. Population structure typically arises from the heterogeneous distribution of individuals in physical space or on social networks. Here we introduce a new type of…
Current theories about mechanisms promoting species co-existence in diverse communities assume that species only interact ecologically. Species are treated as discrete evolutionary entities, even though abundant empirical evidence indicates…
The ecological principle of limiting similarity dictates that species similar in resource requirements will compete, with the superior eventually excluding the inferior competitor from the community. The observation that nonetheless…
This paper explores coevolution and governance of common goods using models of coevolving biospheres, in which adapting populations must collectively regulate their planet's climate or face extinction. The results support the Gaia…
We propose a model of emergence of cooperation in evolutionary games that high- lights the role of network formation and effect of network structure. In line with empirical data, the model proposes a mechanism that explains the persistence…
A number of authors have in recent years proposed that the processes of macroevolution may give rise to self-organized critical phenomena which could have a significant effect on the dynamics of ecosystems. In particular it has been…