Related papers: The evolution of sleep is inevitable
We review models of biological evolution in which the population frequency changes deterministically with time. If the population is self-replicating, although the equations for simple prototypes can be linearised, nonlinear equations arise…
Ecologists have long argued about the strength of density dependence and population regulation, respectively defined as the short-term and long-term rates of return to equilibrium. Here, I give three arguments for the intractability of…
We study the evolution of large but finite asexual populations evolving in fitness landscapes in which all mutations are either neutral or strongly deleterious. We demonstrate that despite the absence of higher fitness genotypes, adaptation…
We consider a population organised hierarchically with respect to size in such a way that the growth rate of each individual depends only on the presence of larger individuals. As a concrete example one might think of a forest, in which the…
Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
In evolutionary game theory, it is customary to be partial to the dynamical models possessing fixed points so that they may be understood as the attainment of evolutionary stability, and hence, Nash equilibrium. Any show of periodic or…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
The paper discusses a connection between asymmetric reproduction -- that is reproduction in a parent-child relationship where the parent does not mutate during reproduction --, the fact that all non-viral lifeforms bear genes of their…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
Essential to each other, growth and exploration are jointly observed in populations, be it alive such as animals and cells or inanimate such as goods and money. But their ability to move, crucial to cope with uncertainty and optimize…
Functional proteins must fold with some minimal stability to a structure that can perform a biochemical task. Here we use a simple model to investigate the relationship between the stability requirement and the capacity of a protein to…
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in population fitness are punctuated by sudden innovations, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We use a recent quantitative mathematical analysis of…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
We consider the dynamics imposed by natural selection on the populations of two competing, sexually reproducing, haploid species. In this setting, the fitness of any genome varies over time due to the changing population mix of the…
Dormancy is a costly adaptive strategy that is widespread among living organisms inhabiting diverse environments. We explore mathematical models of predator-prey systems, in order to assess the impact of prey dormancy on the competition…
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
In the present article, we investigate the effects of dormancy on an abstract population genetic level. We first provide a short review of seed bank models in population genetics, and the role of dormancy for the interplay of evolutionary…