Related papers: Fruitful symbioses between termites and computers
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
We introduce a minimal model of multilevel selection on structured populations, considering the interplay between game theory and population dynamics. Through a bottleneck process, finite groups are formed with cooperators and defectors…
The observed architecture of ecological and socio-economic networks differs significantly from that of random networks. From a network science standpoint, non-random structural patterns observed in real networks call for an explanation of…
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,…
There are enormous amount of examples of Computation in nature, exemplified across multiple species in biology. One crucial aim for these computations across all life forms their ability to learn and thereby increase the chance of their…
We consider the concept of mutual information in ecological networks, and use this idea to analyse the Tangled Nature model of co-evolution. We show that this measure of correlation has two distinct behaviours depending on how we define the…
Patterns of nestedness and specialization asymmetry, where specialist species interact mainly with generalists while generalists interact with both generalists and specialists, are often observed in mutualistic and antagonistic bi-partite…
The concerted responses of eusocial insects to environmental stimuli are often referred to as collective cognition on the level of the colony.To achieve collective cognitiona group can draw on two different sources: individual cognitionand…
We have evolved an IT system that is ubiquitous and pervasive and integrated into most aspects of our lives. Many of us are working on 4th and 5th level refinements in efficiency and functionality. But, we stand on the shoulders of those…
We suggest a novel approach to treating symbiotic relations between biological species or social entities. The main idea is the characterisation of symbiotic relations of coexisting species through their mutual influence on their respective…
Although species longevity is subject to a diverse range of selective forces, the mortality curves of a wide variety of organisms are rather similar. We argue that aging and its universal characteristics may have evolved by means of a…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Exploiting the mathematical curiosity of intransitive dice, we present a simple theoretical model for co-evolution that captures scales ranging from the genome of the individual to the system-wide emergence of species diversity. We study a…
Explaining how competing species coexist remains a central question in ecology. The well-known competitive exclusion principle (CEP) states that two species competing for the same resource cannot stably coexist, and more generally, that the…
Measuring gene expression simultaneously in both hosts and symbionts offers a powerful approach to explore the biology underlying species interactions. Such dual or simultaneous RNAseq approaches have primarily been used to gain insight…
Evolutionary processes proved very useful for solving optimization problems. In this work, we build a formalization of the notion of cooperation and competition of multiple systems working toward a common optimization goal of the population…
We present a simple discrete model for the non-linear spatial interaction of different kinds of ``subpopulations'' composed of identical moving entities like particles, bacteria, individuals, etc. The model allows to mimic a variety of…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
Current research in biology heavily depends on the availability and efficient use of information. In order to build new knowledge, various sources of biological data must often be combined. Semantic Web technologies, which provide a common…
Evolutionary transitions among ecological interactions are widely known, although their detailed dynamics remain absent for most population models. Adaptive dynamics has been used to illustrate how the parameters of population models might…