Related papers: The evolution of sleep is inevitable
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
The evolutionary biology of aging is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of aging and how to develop anti-aging treatments. Thus far most evolutionary theory concerns the genetics of aging with limited physiological integration.…
A model and analysis of the human sleep/wake system is presented. The model is derived using the known neuronal groups, and their various projections, involved with sleep and wake. Inherent in the derivation is the existence of a slow time…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
Existing theories for the evolution of aging and death treat senescence as a side-effect of strong selection for fertility. These theories are well-developed mathematically, but fit poorly with emerging experimental data. The data suggest…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
Three abilities - the ability to recognize sounds, the ability to visually recognize movement and the ability to keep an upright standing position - can function only with using precise measurements of the short time intervals. Other…
Neural codes appear efficient. Naturally, neuroscientists contend that an efficient process is responsible for generating efficient codes. They argue that natural selection is the efficient process that generates those codes. Although…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
In this paper, we investigate the consequences of dormancy in the `rare mutation' and `large population' regime of stochastic adaptive dynamics. Starting from an individual-based micro-model, we first derive the polymorphic evolution…
The question as to why most higher organisms reproduce sexually has remained open despite extensive research, and has been called "the queen of problems in evolutionary biology". Theories dating back to Weismann have suggested that the key…
Sleep is critical to leading a healthy lifestyle. Each day, most people go to sleep without any idea about how their night's rest is going to be. For an activity that humans spend around a third of their life doing, there is a surprising…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
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…
Our wellbeing depends as much on our personal success, as it does on the success of our society. The realization of this fact makes cooperation a very much needed trait. Experiments have shown that rewards can elevate our readiness to…
We consider a population model in which the season alternates between winter and summer, and individuals can acquire mutations either that are advantageous in the summer and disadvantageous in the winter, or vice versa. Also, we assume that…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
Competition between individuals drives the evolution of whole species. Although the fittest individuals survive the longest and produce the most offspring, in some circumstances the resulting species may not be optimally fit. Here, using…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
A number of studies have concluded that dreaming is mostly caused by randomly arriving internal signals because "dream contents are random impulses", and argued that dream sleep is unlikely to play an important part in our intellectual…