Related papers: How does geographical distance translate into gene…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
Many populations of animals or plants, exhibit a metapopulation structure with close, spatially-separated subpopulations. The field of metapopulation theory has made significant advancements since the influential Levins model. Various…
We analytically study the dynamics of evolving populations that exhibit metastability on the level of phenotype or fitness. In constant selective environments, such metastable behavior is caused by two qualitatively different mechanisms.…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…
This paper analyzes a stochastic logistic difference equation under the assumption that the population distribution follows a normal distribution. Our focus is on the mathematical relationship between the average growth rate and a newly…
Speciation is of fundamental importance to understanding the huge diversity of life on Earth. In contrast to current phenomenological models, we develop a biophysically motivated approach to study speciation involving the co-evolution of…
Mechanical interactions among cells in a growing microbial colony can significantly influence the colony's spatial genetic structure and, thus, evolutionary outcomes such as the fates of rare mutations. Here, we computationally investigate…
We study fixation probabilities and times as a consequence of neutral genetic drift in subdivided populations, motivated by a model of the cultural evolutionary process of language change that is described by the same mathematics as the…
Source-sink systems are metapopulations of habitat patches with different, and possibly temporally varying, habitat qualities, which are commonly used in ecology to study the fate of spatially extended natural populations. We propose new…
This paper is concerned with a reaction--diffusion system modeling the fixation and the invasion in a population of a gene drive (an allele biasing inheritance, increasing its own transmission to offspring). In our model, the gene drive has…
Metapopulation models have been a powerful tool for both theorizing and simulating epidemic dynamics. In a metapopulation model, one considers a network composed of subpopulations and their pairwise connections, and individuals are assumed…
Theoretical understanding of evolutionary dynamics in spatially structured populations often relies on non-spatial models. Biofilms are among such populations where a more accurate understanding is of theoretical interest and can reveal new…
We consider a Moran-type model of cultural evolution, which describes how traits emerge, are transmitted, and get lost in populations. Our analysis focuses on the underlying cultural genealogies; they were first described by Aguilar and…
A large offspring number diploid biparental multilocus population model of Moran type is our object of study. At each timestep, a pair of diploid individuals drawn uniformly at random contribute offspring to the population. The number of…
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 explore the connection between migration patterns and emergent behaviors of evolving populations in spatially heterogeneous environments. Despite extensive studies in ecologically and medically important systems, a unifying framework…
The metaphor of holey adaptive landscapes provides a pictorial representation of the process of speciation as a consequence of genetic divergence. In this metaphor, biological populations diverge along connected clusters of well-fit…
Genetic variation in human populations is influenced by geographic ancestry due to spatial locality in historical mating and migration patterns. Spatial population structure in genetic datasets has been traditionally analyzed using either…
We consider neutral evolution of a large population subject to changes in its population size. For a population with a time-variable carrying capacity we have computed the distributions of the total branch lengths of its sample genealogies.…
Darwinian evolution is driven by random mutations, genetic recombination (gene shuffling) and selection that favors genotypes with high fitness. For systems where each genotype can be represented as a bitstring of length $L$, an overview of…