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There has recently been an explosion of interest in how "higher-order" structures emerge in complex systems. This "emergent" organization has been found in a variety of natural and artificial systems, although at present the field lacks a…
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions…
Many real systems are strongly characterized by collective cooperative phenomena whose existence and properties still need a satisfactory explanation. Coherently with their collective nature, they call for new and more accurate descriptions…
Traditionally, resource limitation in evolutionary game theory is assumed just to impose a constant population size. Here we show that resource limitations may generate dynamical payoffs able to alter an original prisoner's dilemma, and to…
Microbial communities routinely have several alternative stable states observed for the same environmental parameters. Sudden and irreversible transitions between these states make external manipulation of these systems more complicated. To…
Higher-order interactions are prevalent in real-world complex systems and exert unique influences on system evolution that cannot be captured by pairwise interactions. We incorporate game transitions into the higher-order prisoner's dilemma…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
Social dilemmas are an integral part of social interactions. Cooperative actions, ranging from secreting extra-cellular products in microbial populations to donating blood in humans, are costly to the actor and hence create an incentive to…
We introduce an Interaction and Trade-off based Eco-Evolutionary Model (ITEEM), in which species are competing for common resources in a well-mixed system, and their evolution in interaction trait space is subject to a life-history…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
The interactions between individuals play a pivotal role in shaping the structure and dynamics of social systems. Complex network models have proven invaluable in uncovering the underlying mechanisms that govern the formation and evolution…
The ability of biological and artificial collectives to outperform solitary individuals in a wide variety of tasks depends crucially on the efficient processing of social and environmental information at the level of the collective. Here,…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
In ecological systems heterogeneous interactions between pathogens take place simultaneously. This occurs, for instance, when two pathogens cooperate, while at the same time multiple strains of these pathogens co-circulate and compete.…
Tipping points are critical thresholds of parameters where tiny perturbations can lead to abrupt and large qualitative changes in the systems. Many real-world systems that exhibit tipping behavior can be represented as networks of…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
A longstanding goal of biology is to identify the key genes and species that critically impact evolution, ecology, and health. Network analysis has revealed keystone species that regulate ecosystems and master regulators that regulate…