Related papers: The Host-Pathogen Game: an evolutionary approach t…
How coperation between self-interested individuals evolve is a crucial problem, both in biology and in social sciences, that is far from being well understood. Evolutionary game theory is a useful approach to this issue. The simplest model…
Understanding the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and is frequently studied by the framework of evolutionary game theory. A very powerful mechanism to promote cooperation is…
In this work, we analyse the relationship between heterogeneity and cooperation. Previous investigations suggest that this relation is nontrivial, as some authors found that heterogeneity sustains cooperation, while others obtained…
Situations where individuals have to contribute to joint efforts or share scarce resources are ubiquitous. Yet, without proper mechanisms to ensure cooperation, the evolutionary pressure to maximize individual success tends to create a…
The emergence or adaptation of pathogens may lead to epidemics, highlighting the need for a thorough understanding of pathogen evolution. The tradeoff hypothesis suggests that virulence evolves to reach an optimal transmission intensity…
We analyze a stylized model of co-evolution between any two purely competing species (e.g., host and parasite), both sexually reproducing. Similarly to a recent model of Livnat \etal~\cite{evolfocs14} the fitness of an individual depends on…
The environment has a strong influence on a population's evolutionary dynamics. Driven by both intrinsic and external factors, the environment is subject to continual change in nature. To capture an ever-changing environment, we consider a…
The emergence and maintenance of cooperation has attracted intensive scholarly interest and has been analysed within the framework of evolutionary game theory. The role of innovation, which introduces novel strategies into the population,…
We study the combined influence of selection and random fluctuations on the evolutionary dynamics of two-strategy ("cooperation" and "defection") games in populations comprising cooperation facilitators. The latter are individuals that…
Prevalence of cooperation within groups of selfish individuals is puzzling in that it contradicts with the basic premise of natural selection. Favoring players with higher fitness, the latter is key for understanding the challenges faced by…
Despite the wealth of empirical and theoretical studies, the origin and maintenance of cooperation is still an evolutionary riddle. In this context, ecological life-history traits which affect the efficiency of selection may play a role,…
Cell cultures exhibit rich and complex behaviors driven by dynamic metabolic interactions among cells. In this work, we present a model that captures these interactions through a framework inspired by statistical mechanics. Using Monte…
The canonical view of the interactions between viruses and their microbial hosts presumes that changes in host and virus fate require the initiation of infection of a host by a virus. That is, first virus particles diffuse randomly outside…
Communication and coordination play a major role in the ability of bacterial cells to adapt to ever changing environments and conditions. Recent work has shown that such coordination underlies several aspects of bacterial responses…
Innovation and evolution are two processes of paramount relevance for social and biological systems. In general, the former allows to introduce elements of novelty, while the latter is responsible for the motion of a system in its phase…
We are interested in modeling some two-level population dynamics, resulting from the interplay of ecological interactions and phenotypic variation of individuals (or hosts) and the evolution of cells (or parasites) of two types living in…
We study the evolution of cooperation in an interacting particle system with two types. The model we investigate is an extension of a two-type biased voter model. One type (called defector) has a (positive) bias $\alpha$ with respect to the…
We introduce and analyze a within-host dynamical model of the coevolution between rapidly mutating pathogens and the adaptive immune response. Pathogen mutation and a homeostatic constraint on lymphocytes both play a role in allowing the…
Game theory formalizes certain interactions between physical particles or between living beings in biology, sociology, and economics, and quantifies the outcomes by payoffs. The prisoner's dilemma (PD) describes situations in which it is…
Cooperation is a difficult proposition in the face of Darwinian selection. Those that defect have an evolutionary advantage over cooperators who should therefore die out. However, spatial structure enables cooperators to survive through the…