Related papers: Breaking the spell of nestedness
When three species compete cyclically in a well-mixed, stochastic system of $N$ individuals, extinction is known to typically occur at times scaling as the system size $N$. This happens, for example, in rock-paper-scissors games or…
We study the evolution of networks when the creation and decay of links are based on the position of nodes in the network measured by their centrality. We show that the same network dynamics arises under various centrality measures, and…
The study of human interactions is of central importance for understanding the behavior of individuals, groups and societies. Here, we observe the formation and evolution of networks by monitoring the addition of all new links and we…
In many indigenous societies, people are categorised into several cultural groups, or clans, within which they believe to share ancestors. Clan attributions provide certain rules for marriage and descent. Such rules between clans constitute…
A classic measure of ecological stability describes the tendency of a community to return to equilibrium after small perturbation. While many advances show how the network structure of these communities severely constrains such tendencies,…
Research over the past few decades has assumed the richness (number of species) to be the primary driver of the biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF) relationship. However, biodiversity is multi-dimensional, and richness alone does not…
We model a social-encounter network where linked nodes match for reproduction in a manner depending probabilistically on each node`s attractiveness. The developed model reveals that increasing either the network`s mean degree or the…
A mutualism is an interaction where the involved species benefit from each other. We study a two-dimensional hexagonal three-state cellular automaton model of a two-species mutualistic system. The simple model is characterized by four…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
The behavior of ecological systems mainly relies on the interactions between the species it involves. We consider the problem of inferring the species interaction network from abundance data. To be relevant, any network inference…
A growing body of empirical evidence indicates that social and cooperative behavior can be affected by cognitive and neurological factors, suggesting the existence of state-based decision-making mechanisms that may have emerged by…
Modularity structures are common in various social and biological networks. However, its dynamical origin remains an open question. In this work, we set up a dynamical model describing the evolution of a social network. Based on the…
The recent discovery of universal principles underlying many complex networks occurring across a wide range of length scales in the biological world has spurred physicists in trying to understand such features using techniques from…
To understand the biodiversity of an ecosystem cannot be understood by solely analyzing the pair relations of competing species. Instead, we should consider multi-point interactions because the presence of a third party could change the…
Traditionally, the evolution of cooperation has been studied on single, isolated networks. Yet a player, especially in human societies, will typically be a member of many different networks, and those networks will play a different role in…
The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…
The increasing volume of ecologically and biologically relevant data has revealed a wide collection of emergent patterns in living systems. Analyzing different datasets, ranging from metabolic gene-regulatory to species interaction…
Interactions among living organisms, from bacteria colonies to human societies, are inherently more complex than interactions among particles and nonliving matter. Group interactions are a particularly important and widespread class,…
Biological networks have evolved to be highly functional within uncertain environments while remaining extremely adaptable. One of the main contributors to the robustness and evolvability of biological networks is believed to be their…
In spite of its relevance to the origin of complex networks, the interplay between form and function and its role during network formation remains largely unexplored. While recent studies introduce dynamics by considering rewiring processes…