Related papers: Can evolution paths be explained by chance alone?
The strong Allee effect plays an important role on the evolution of population in ecological systems. One important concept is the Allee threshold that determines the persistence or extinction of the population in a long time. In general, a…
Macroevolutionary dynamics often display sudden, explosive surges, where systems remain relatively stable for extended periods before experiencing dramatic acceleration that frequently exceeds traditional exponential growth. This pattern is…
The growth of a population divided among spatial sites, with migration between the sites, is sometimes modelled by a product of random matrices, with each diagonal elements representing the growth rate in a given time period, and…
We give a proof of a result on the growth of the number of particles along chosen paths in a branching Brownian motion. The work follows the approach of classical large deviations results, in which paths in $C[0,1]$ are rescaled onto…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
We study the record statistics of random walks after $n$ steps, $x_0, x_1,\ldots, x_n$, with arbitrary symmetric and continuous distribution $p(\eta)$ of the jumps $\eta_i = x_i - x_{i-1}$. We consider the age of the records, i.e. the time…
Top-down causation has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems. Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down…
We describe a simple model of evolution which incorporates the branching and extinction of species lines, and also includes abiotic influences. A first principles approach is taken in which the probability for speciation and extinction are…
We investigate by means of a simple theoretical model the emergence of prime numbers as life cycles, as those seen for some species of cicadas. The cicadas, more precisely, the Magicicadas spend most of their lives below the ground and then…
We explore some aspects of the relationship between biological evolution processes and the mathematical theory of records. For Eigen's quasispecies model with an uncorrelated fitness landscape, we show that the evolutionary trajectories…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
We investigate the evolution of populations of random Boolean networks under selection for robustness of the dynamics with respect to the perturbation of the state of a node. The fitness landscape contains a huge plateau of maximum fitness…
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…
We consider a random walk on $\Z$ that branches at the origin only. In the supercritical regime we establish a law of large number for the maximal position $M_n$. Then we determine all possible limiting law for the sequence $M_n -\alpha n$…
The tempo and mode of an adaptive process is strongly determined by the structure of the fitness landscape that underlies it. In order to be able to predict evolutionary outcomes (even on the short term), we must know more about the nature…
We follow up on a companion work that considered growth rates of populations growing at different sites, with different randomly varying growth rates at each site, in the limit as migration between sites goes to 0. We extend this work here…
The modelling of evolutionary game dynamics in finite populations requires microscopic processes that determine how strategies spread. The exact details of these processes are often chosen without much further consideration. Different types…
Under the effect of strong genetic drift, it is highly probable to observe gene fixation or gene loss in a population, shown by infinite peaks on a coherently constructed potential energy landscape. It is then important to ask what such…
In a recent paper [1] Lineweaver and Davis performed a statistical analysis to claim that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth indicates high probability of biogenesis on terrestrial- type planets. We argue that the rapid appearance of life…