Related papers: The evolving system of Trypillian settlements
Preserving biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a challenge that can be pursued through modern statistical mechanics modeling. Here we introduce a variational maximum entropy-based algorithm to evaluate the entropy in a minimal ecosystem…
We introduce and study a stochastic model for the dynamics of colonial species, which reproduce through fission or fragmentation. The fission rate depends on the relative sizes of colonies in the population, and the growth rate of colonies…
Measures of wealth and production have been found to scale superlinearly with the population of a city. Therefore, it makes economic sense for humans to congregate together in dense settlements. A recent model of population dynamics showed…
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…
Evolutionary branching is analysed in a stochastic, individual-based population model under mutation and selection. In such models, the common assumption is that individual reproduction and life career are characterised by values of a…
Using population data of high spatial resolution for a region in the south of Europe, we define cities by aggregating individuals to form connected clusters. The resulting cluster-population distributions show a smooth decreasing behavior…
Mathematical modelling of the evolution of the size-spectrum dynamics in aquatic ecosystems was discovered to be a powerful tool to have a deeper insight into impacts of human- and environmental driven changes on the marine ecosystem. In…
Zipf's, Heaps' and Taylor's laws are ubiquitous in many different systems where innovation processes are at play. Together, they represent a compelling set of stylized facts regarding the overall statistics, the innovation rate and the…
We review and extend results for mutation, selection, genetic drift, and migration in a one-dimensional continuous population. The population is described by a continuous limit of the stepping stone model, which leads to the stochastic…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…
Standard neutral population genetics theory with a strictly fixed population size has important limitations. An alternative model that allows independently fluctuating population sizes and reproduces the standard neutral evolution is…
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 have explored the buildup of the local mass-size relation of elliptical galaxies using two visually classified samples. At low redshift we compiled a subsample of 2,656 elliptical galaxies from SDSS, whereas at higher redshift (up to…
We investigate the large population dynamics of a family of stochastic particle systems with three-state cyclic individual behaviour and parameter-dependent transition rates. On short time scales, the dynamics turns out to be approximated…
The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of…
The metapopulation theory explores the population persistence in fragmented habitats by considering a balance between the extinction of local populations and recolonization of empty sites. In general, the extinction and colonization rates…
Biological systems are typically highly open, non-equilibrium systems that are very challenging to understand from a statistical mechanics perspective. While statistical treatments of evolutionary biological systems have a long and rich…
There have been many studies to examine whether one trait is correlated with another trait across a group of present-day species (for example, do species with larger brains tend to have longer gestation times. Since the introduction of the…
One of the most directly observable features of a transiting multi-planet system is their size-ordering when ranked in orbital separation. Kepler has revealed a rich diversity of outcomes, from perfectly ordered systems, like Kepler-80, to…
With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…