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Local coexistence of species in large ecosystems is traditionally explained within the broad framework of niche theory. However, its rationale hardly justifies rich biodiversity observed in nearly homogeneous environments. Here we consider…
A symmetrical cubic discrete coupled logistic equation is proposed to model the symbiotic interaction of two isolated species. The coupling depends on the population size of both species and on a positive constant $\lambda$, named the…
Natural evolution gives the impression of leading to an open-ended process of increasing diversity and complexity. If our goal is to produce such open-endedness artificially, this suggests an approach driven by evolutionary metaphor. On the…
The Tangled Nature Model of biological and cultural evolution features interacting agents which compete for limited resources and reproduce in an error prone fashion and at a rate depending on the `tangle' of interactions they maintain with…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
In the prospect of ecology and biology, studying insect-plant predation will considerably contribute to pest control, benefit agriculture and afforestation, and also help people to better understand insect-plant co-evolution. Therefore, we…
The drive for reproducibility in the computational sciences has provoked discussion and effort across a broad range of perspectives: technological, legislative/policy, education, and publishing. Discussion on these topics is not new, but…
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…
We present a computational simulation of evolving entities that includes symbiosis with shifting levels of selection. Evolution by natural selection shifts from the level of the original entities to the level of the new symbiotic entity. In…
The biological requirements for an ecosystem to develop and maintain species diversity are in general unknown. Here we consider a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually excluding organisms competing for space [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev.…
Computer viruses have many similarities to biological viruses, and their association may offer new perspectives and new opportunities in the effort to tackle and even eradicate them. Evolutionary game theory has been established as a useful…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
To maintain homeostasis, living cells process information with networks of interacting molecules. Traditional models for cellular information processing have focused on networks of chemical reactions between molecules. Here, we describe how…
One of many important features of the tumour microenvironment is that it is a place of active Darwinian selection where different tumour clones become adapted to the variety of ecological niches that make up the microenvironment. These…
It is still not understood how similar genomic sequences have generated diverse and spectacular forms during evolution. The difficulty to bridge phenotypes and genotypes stems from the complexity of multicellular systems, where thousands of…
Analogous to living ecosystems in nature, web services form an artificial ecosystem consisting of many tags and their associated media, such as photographs, movies, and web pages created by human users. Concerning biological ecosystems, we…
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…
Understanding systems level behaviour of many interacting agents is challenging in various ways, here we'll focus on the how the interaction between components can lead to hierarchical structures with different types of dynamics, or…