Related papers: Predicting patterns of long-term adaptation and ex…
Many species see their range shifted poleward in response to global warming and need to keep pace in order to survive. To understand the effect of climate change on species ranges and its consequences on population dynamics, we consider a…
The causes of major and rapid transitions observed in biological macroevolution as well as in the evolution of social systems are a subject of much debate. Here we identify the proximate causes of crashes and recoveries that arise…
Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in an evolving population are punctuated by a sudden burst of change, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We analyze the population dynamics for a…
We consider stochastic growth models for populations organized in colonies and subject to uniform catastrophes. To assess population viability, we analyze scenarios in which individuals adopt dispersion strategies after catastrophic events.…
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…
Evolution is a dynamic process. The two classical forces of evolution are mutation and selection. Assuming small mutation rates, evolution can be predicted based solely on the fitness differences between phenotypes. Predicting an…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
We consider a stochastic model of population dynamics where each individual is characterised by a trait in {0,1,...,L} and has a natural reproduction rate, a logistic death rate due to age or competition and a probability of mutation…
Population extinction is a rare event which requires overcoming an effective barrier. We show that the extinction rate can be fragile: a small change in the system parameters leads to an exponentially strong change of the rate, with the…
'Evolutionary rescue' is the potential for evolution to enable population persistence in a changing environment. Even with eventual rescue, evolutionary time lags can cause the population size to temporarily fall below a threshold…
Deterministic evolutionary game dynamics can lead to stable coexistences of different types. Stochasticity, however, drives the loss of such coexistences. This extinction is usually accompanied by population size fluctuations. We…
Neutral dynamics, where taxa are assumed to be demographically equivalent and their abundance is governed solely by the stochasticity of the underlying birth-death process, has proved itself as an important minimal model that accounts for…
Many biological populations exhibit diversity in their strategy for survival and reproduction in a given environment, and microbes are an example. We explore the fate of different strategies under sustained environmental change by…
Many mathematical frameworks of evolutionary game dynamics assume that the total population size is constant and that selection affects only the relative frequency of strategies. Here, we consider evolutionary game dynamics in an extended…
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…
Genetic fitness optimization using small populations or small population updates across generations generally suffers from randomly diverging evolutions. We propose a notion of highly probable fitness optimization through feasible…
Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…
Real-world optimisation problems are often dynamic. Previously good solutions must be updated or replaced due to changes in objectives and constraints. It is often claimed that evolutionary algorithms are particularly suitable for dynamic…
Population structure can be modelled by evolutionary graphs, which can have a substantial, but very subtle influence on the fate of the arising mutants. Individuals are located on the nodes of these graphs, competing with each other to…
Infinite population models are important tools for studying population dynamics of evolutionary algorithms. They describe how the distributions of populations change between consecutive generations. In general, infinite population models…