Related papers: Multiscale Structure in Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
From critical infrastructure, to physiology and the human brain, complex systems rarely occur in isolation. Instead, the functioning of nodes in one system often promotes or suppresses the functioning of nodes in another. Despite advances…
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 possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
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,…
Many natural and engineered complex networks have intricate mesoscopic organization, e.g., the clustering of the constituent nodes into several communities or modules. Often, such modularity is manifested at several different hierarchical…
Competitive exclusion, a key principle of ecology, can be generalized to understand many other complex systems. Individuals under surviving pressure tend to be different from others, and correlations among them change correspondingly to the…
In many self-organising systems the ability to extract necessary resources from the external environment is essential to the system's growth and survival. Examples include the extraction of sunlight and nutrients in organic plants, of…
Fluctuating environments are situations where the spatio-temporal stochasticity plays a significant role in the evolutionary dynamics. The study of the evolution of cooperation in these environments typically assumes a homogeneous, well…
We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…
Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the…
The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact not only with each other but indirectly through environmental effects, however…
The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Complex systems are characterized by many interacting units that give rise to emergent behavior. A particularly advantageous way to study these systems is through the analysis of the networks that encode the interactions among the system's…
A defining property of complex systems is that they have multiscale structure. How does this multiscale structure come about? We argue that within systems there emerges a hierarchy of scales that contribute to a system's causal workings. An…
Constraints placed upon the phenotypes of organisms result from their interactions with the environment. Over evolutionary timescales, these constraints feed back onto smaller molecular subnetworks comprising the organism. The evolution of…
We study the spatial patterns formed by a system of interacting particles where the mobility of any individual is determined by the population crowding at two different spatial scales. In this way we model the behavior of some biological…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic…