Related papers: A hypothesis in evolutionary biology
In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow,…
Maintenance of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination imposes physiological costs when compared to parthenogenic reproduction, most prominently: for maintaining the corresponding (molecular) machinery, for finding a mating partner,…
A major challenge in biology is explaining how novel characters originate, however, the molecular mechanisms that underlie the emergence of evolutionary innovations are unclear. Here we show that while gene expression in the uterus evolves…
We examine an evolutionary naming-game model where communicating agents are equipped with an evolutionarily selected learning ability. Such a coupling of biological and linguistic ingredients results in an abrupt transition: upon a small…
The puzzle associated with the cost of sex, an old problem of evolutionary biology, is discussed here from the point of view of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. The results suggest, in a simplified model, that the prevalence of sexual…
Evolutionary graph theory is a well established framework for modelling the evolution of social behaviours in structured populations. An emerging consensus in this field is that graphs that exhibit heterogeneity in the number of connections…
The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living…
Biological networks of interacting agents exhibit similar topological properties for a wide range of scales, from cellular to ecological levels, suggesting the existence of a common evolutionary origin. A general evolutionary mechanism…
Darwinian evolution can be modeled in general terms as a flow in the space of fitness (i.e. reproductive rate) distributions. In the diffusion approximation, Tsimring et al. have showed that this flow admits "fitness wave" solutions:…
We present a stylized model with feedback loops for the evolution of a population's wealth over generations. Individuals have both talent and wealth: talent is a random variable distributed identically for everyone, but wealth is a random…
The preferred conditions for evolutionary innovation is a fundamental question, but little is known, in part because the question involves rare events. We focused on the potential role of polyploidy in the evolution of novel traits. There…
In the past years, a remarkable mapping has been found between the dynamics of a population of M individuals undergoing random mutations and selection, and that of a single system in contact with a thermal bath with temperature 1/M. This…
Many socio-economic and biological processes can be modeled as systems of interacting individuals. The behaviour of such systems can be often described within game-theoretic models. In these lecture notes, we introduce fundamental concepts…
The evolution of two species with different fitness is investigated on degree-heterogeneous graphs. The population evolves either by one individual dying and being replaced by the offspring of a random neighbor (voter model (VM) dynamics)…
Sex in higher diploids carries a two-fold cost of males that should reduce its fitness relative to cloning and result in its extinction. Instead, sex is widespread and it is clonal species that face early obsolescence. One possible reason…
Extending the previous 2-gender dioecious diploid gene-mating evolution model [arXiv:1410.3456], we attempt to answer "whether the Hardy-Weinberg global stability and the exact analytic dynamical solutions can be found in the generalized…
Ignoring the differences between countries, human reproductive and dispersal behaviors can be described by some standardized models, so whether there is a universal law of population growth hidden in the abundant and unstructured data from…
Sexual selection is a fundamental aspect of evolution for all eukaryotic organisms with mating types. This paper suggests intersexual selection is best viewed as a mechanism to compensate for the unavoidable dynamics of coevolution between…