Related papers: The Evolution of Sex through the Baldwin Effect
We use a two-sex partial differential equation (PDE) model based on the Grandmother Hypothesis. We build on an earlier model by Kim et al. [27] by allowing for evolution in both longevity and age at last birth, and also assuming that…
Reproductive success and survival are influenced by wealth in human populations. Wealth is transmitted to offsprings and strategies of transmission vary over time and among populations, the main variation being how equally wealth is…
What features characterise complex system dynamics? Power laws and scale invariance of fluctuations are often taken as the hallmarks of complexity, drawing on analogies with equilibrium critical phenomena[1-3]. Here we argue that slow,…
This paper summarizes previous work linking protein aggregation to the heterozygosity of organisms. It also cites the literature showing a correlation between species' morphological complexity and the lengths of their proteins. These two…
A simple model of macroevolution is proposed exhibiting both the property of punctuated equilibrium and the dynamics of potentialities for different species to evolve towards increasingly higher complexity. It is based on the phenomenon of…
A two-type two-sex branching process is introduced with the aim of describing the interaction of predator and prey populations with sexual reproduction and promiscuous mating. In each generation and in each species the total number of…
Biological aging is characterized by an age-dependent increase in the probability of death and by a decrease in the reproductive capacity. Individual age-dependent rates of survival and reproduction have a strong impact on population…
We present an individual based model of evolutionary ecology. The reproduction rate of individuals characterized by their genome depends on the composition of the population in genotype space. Ecological features such as the taxonomy and…
DNA looping plays a fundamental role in a wide variety of biological processes, providing the backbone for long range interactions on DNA. Here we develop the first model for DNA looping by an arbitrarily large number of proteins and solve…
Consumers face numerous risks that can be minimized by incorporating different life-history strategies. How much and when a consumer adds to its energetic reserves or invests in reproduction are key behavioral and physiological adaptations…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…
The cell cycle duration is a variable cellular phenotype that underlies long-term population growth and age structures. By analyzing the stationary solutions of a branching process with heritable cell division times, we demonstrate…
Theories to explain the prevalence of sex and recombination have long been a central theme of evolutionary biology. Yet despite decades of attention dedicated to the evolution of sex and recombination, the widespread pattern of…
Diversity is a fundamental feature of ecosystems, even when the concept of ecosystem is extended to sociology or economics. Diversity can be intended as the count of different items, animals, or, more generally, interactions. There are two…
It has been suggested that major transitions in evolution require the emergence of novelties, often associated to the cooperative behaviour of previously existing objects or agents. A key innovation involves the first cooperative…
Males are often the "sicker" sex with male biased parasitism found in a taxonomically diverse range of species. There is considerable interest in the processes that could underlie the evolution of sex-biased parasitism. Mating system…
We propose a physical model for developmental process at cellular level to discuss the mechanism of epigenetic landscape. In our simplified model, a minimal model, the network of the interaction among cells generates the landscape…
Most conspicuous organisms are multicellular and most multicellular organisms develop somatic cells to perform specific, non-reproductive tasks. The ubiquity of this division of labor suggests that it is highly advantageous. In this paper,…
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…
Feedback loops are essential for regulating cell proliferation and maintaining the delicate balance between cell division and cell death. Thanks to the exact solution of a few simple models of cell growth it is by now clear that stochastic…