Related papers: Environmental stochasticity and the speed of evolu…
A natural phenomenon occurring in a living system is an outcome of the dynamics of the specific biological network underlying the phenomenon. The collective dynamics have both deterministic and stochastic components. The stochastic nature…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
We look at the interaction of dispersal and environmental stochasticity in $n$-patch models. We are able to prove persistence and extinction results even in the setting when the dispersal rates are stochastic. As applications we look at…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
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…
We study a model for the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) used by biological populations for choosing the time of life-history events, such as migration and breeding. In our model we accounted for both intra-species competition (early…
Evolutionary game theory has traditionally employed deterministic models to describe population dynamics. These models, due to their inherent nonlinearities, can exhibit deterministic chaos, where population fluctuations follow complex,…
In this paper we consider the global qualitative properties of a stochastically perturbed logistic model of population growth. In this model, the stochastic perturbations are assumed to be of the white noise type and are proportional to the…
We report that population dynamics in fluctuating environment accompanies mathematically equivalent structure to steady state thermodynamics. By employing the structure, population growth in fluctuating environment is decomposed into…
Understanding under what conditions interacting populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, coexist is a question of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and…
We examine to what extent the tempo and mode of environmental fluctuations matter for the growth of structured populations. The models are switching, linear ordinary differential equations $x'(t)=A(\sigma(\omega t))x(t)$ where…
Cooperation is a persistent behavioral pattern of entities pooling and sharing resources. Its ubiquity in nature poses a conundrum. Whenever two entities cooperate, one must willingly relinquish something of value to the other. Why is this…
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…
Biological organisms have to cope with stochastic variations in both the external environment and the internal population dynamics. Theoretical studies and laboratory experiments suggest that population diversification could be an effective…
Previous evolutionary studies demonstrated how evaluating evolving agents in variable environmental conditions enable them to develop solutions that are robust to environmental variation. We demonstrate how the robustness of the agents can…
Understanding the causes and effects of spatial aggregation is one of the most fundamental problems in ecology. Aggregation is an emergent phenomenon arising from the interactions between the individuals of the population, able to sense…
Single-cell experiments revealed substantial variability in generation times, growth rates but also in birth and division sizes between genetically identical cells. Understanding how these fluctuations determine the fitness of the…
Strategies aimed at reducing the negative effects of long-term uncertainty and risk are common in biology, game theory, and finance, even if they entail a cost in terms of mean benefit. Here, we focus on the single mutant's invasion of a…
Dispersal of species to find a more favorable habitat is important in population dynamics. Dispersal rates evolve in response to the relative success of different dispersal strategies. In a simplified deterministic treatment (J. Dockery, V.…