Related papers: Evolutionary value of collective sensing
As one of the most widespread social dynamics, cooperative behavior is among the most fascinating collective phenomena. Several animal species, from social insects to human beings, feature social groups altruistically working for a common…
Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others' successes. But acquiring such knowledge is not always easy, especially in real-world environments where success is hidden from public view. We suggest that…
We study the evolution of the network properties of a populated network embedded in a genotype space characterised by either a low or a high number of potential links, with particular emphasis on the connectivity and clustering. Evolution…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
Varied sensory systems use noise in order to enhance detection of weak signals. It has been conjectured in the literature that this effect, known as stochastic resonance, may take place in central cognitive processes such as the memory…
We present a new model of the evolutionary dynamics and the growth of on-line social networks. The model emulates people's strategies for acquiring information in social networks, emphasising the local subjective view of an individual and…
Imitation is an important learning heuristic in animal and human societies. Previous explorations report that the fate of individuals with cooperative strategies is sensitive to the protocol of imitation, leading to a conundrum about how…
In complex ecosystems such as microbial communities, there is constant ecological and evolutionary feedback between the residing species and the environment occurring on concurrent timescales. Species respond and adapt to their surroundings…
Individual heterogeneity is a key characteristic of many real-world systems, from organisms to humans. However its role in determining the system's collective dynamics is typically not well understood. Here we study how individual…
Social movements, neurons in the brain or even industrial suppliers are best described by agents evolving on networks with basic interaction rules. In these real systems, the connectivity between agents corresponds to the a critical state…
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,…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
We have simulated the evolution of age structured populations whose individuals represented by their diploid genomes were distributed on a square lattice. The environmental conditions on the whole territory changed simultaneously in the…
Temporal social networks of human interactions are preponderant in understanding the fundamental patterns of human behavior. In these networks, interactions occur locally between individuals (i.e., nodes) who connect with each other at…
Collective movement is observed widely in nature, where individuals interact locally to produce globally ordered, coherent motion. In typical models of collective motion, each individual takes the average direction of multiple neighbors,…
We consider the concept of mutual information in ecological networks, and use this idea to analyse the Tangled Nature model of co-evolution. We show that this measure of correlation has two distinct behaviours depending on how we define the…
Understanding the statistical dynamics of growth and inequality is a fundamental challenge to ecology and society. Recent analyses of wealth and income dynamics in contemporary societies show that economic inequality is very dynamic and…
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…
The evolution of symbolic communication is a longstanding open research question in biology. While some theories suggest that it originated from sub-symbolic communication (i.e., iconic or indexical), little experimental evidence exists on…