Related papers: An Evolutionary Theory for the Variability Hypothe…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…
We discuss Bayesian model uncertainty analysis and forecasting in sequential dynamic modeling of multivariate time series. The perspective is that of a decision-maker with a specific forecasting objective that guides thinking about relevant…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…
Horizontal gene transfer consists in exchanging genetic materials between microorganisms during their lives. This is a major mechanism of bacterial evolution and is believed to be of main importance in antibiotics resistance. We consider a…
The prevalence of many urban phenomena changes systematically with population size. We propose a theory that unifies models of economic complexity and cultural evolution to derive urban scaling. The theory accounts for the difference in…
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…
Maintaining genetic diversity as a means to avoid premature convergence is critical in Genetic Programming. Several approaches have been proposed to achieve this, with some focusing on the mating phase from coupling dissimilar solutions to…
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…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
It has been shown that differences in fecundity variance can influence the probability of invasion of a genotype in a population, i.e. a genotype with lower variance in offspring number can be favored in finite populations even if it has a…
Risk spreading in bacterial populations is generally regarded as a strategy to maximize survival. Here, we study its role during range expansion of a genetically diverse population where growth and motility are two alternative traits. We…
Large differences between the properties of the known sample of cataclysmic variable stars (CVs) and the predictions of the theory of binary star evolution have long been recognised. However, because all existing CV samples suffer from…
Kin selection theory is a kind of causal analysis. The initial form of kin selection ascribed cause to costs, benefits, and genetic relatedness. The theory then slowly developed a deeper and more sophisticated approach to partitioning the…
This paper introduces a variational formulation of natural selection, paying special attention to the nature of "things" and the way that different "kinds" of "things" are individuated from - and influence - each other. We use the Bayesian…
Social networks have turned out to be of fundamental importance both for our understanding human sociality and for the design of digital communication technology. However, social networks are themselves based on dyadic relationships and we…
A general principle is advanced allowing the classification of nonunique solutions to nonlinear evolution equations, corresponding to different spatio-temporal patterns. This is done by defining the probability distribution of patterns,…
In evolutionary dynamics, a key measure of a mutant trait's success is the probability that it takes over the population given some initial mutant-appearance distribution. This "fixation probability" is difficult to compute in general, as…
Recently several authors have proposed stochastic evolutionary models for the growth of complex networks that give rise to power-law distributions. These models are based on the notion of preferential attachment leading to the ``rich get…