Related papers: How neutral and niche forces contribute to speciat…
In this study, we construct an evolutionary model of a population of DNA sequences interacting with the surrounding environment on the topological monoid A* of strings on the alphabet A = { a, c, g, t }. A partial differential equation…
Species extinction is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. Competition between species in a population is considered by ecological niche-based theories as a key factor leading to different severity of species…
The outcome of competition among species is influenced by the spatial distribution of species and effects such as demographic stochasticity, immigration fluxes, and the existence of preferred habitats. We introduce an individual-based model…
Neutral theories have played a crucial and revolutionary role in fields such as population genetics and biogeography. These theories are critical by definition, in the sense that the overall growth rate of each single allele/species/type…
Although geographic isolation has been shown to play a key role in promoting reproductive isolation, it is now believed that speciation can also happen in sympatry and with considerable gene flow. Here we present a model of sympatric…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…
A novel mechanism for sympatric speciation that takes into account complex bio-processes within each individual organism is proposed. According to dynamical systems theory, organisms with identical genotypes can possess differentiated…
Patterns of biodiversity predicted by the neutral theory rely on a simple phenomenological model of speciation. To further investigate the effect of speciation on neutral biodiversity, we analyze a spatially-explicit neutral model based on…
Understanding the forces shaping ecological communities is crucially important to basic science and conservation. In recent years, considerable progress was made in explaining communities using simple and general models, with neutral theory…
When a collection of phenotypically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources, with competition being strongest amongst the most similar, the population can evolve into tightly localised clusters. This process can be…
There have been many studies to examine whether one trait is correlated with another trait across a group of present-day species (for example, do species with larger brains tend to have longer gestation times. Since the introduction of the…
Despite its radical assumption of ecological equivalence between species, neutral biodiversity theory can often provide good fits to species abundance distributions observed in nature. Major criticisms of neutral theory have focused on…
Competition between species and genotypes is a dominant factor in a variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Biological dynamics are typically highly stochastic, and therefore, analyzing a competitive system requires accounting for…
A microscopic agent dynamical model for diploid age-structured populations is used to study evolution of polymorphism and sympatric speciation. The underlying ecology is represented by a unimodal distribution of resources of some width.…
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
Environmental fluctuations have important consequences in the organization of ecological communities, and understanding how such a variability influences the biodiversity of an ecosystem is a major question in ecology. In this paper, we…
Competition is the main driver of population dynamics, which shapes the genetic composition of populations and the assembly of ecological communities. Neutral models assume that all the individuals are equivalent and that the dynamics is…
Understanding the mechanisms of species coexistence has always been a fundamental topic in ecology. Classical theory predicts that interspecific competition may select for traits that stabilize niche differences, although recent work shows…
Existing theoretical models of evolution focus on the relative fitness advantages of different mutants in a population while the dynamic behavior of the population size is mostly left unconsidered. We here present a generic stochastic model…
In this paper, we inspect well-known population genetics and social dynamics models. In these models, interacting individuals, while participating in a self-organizing process, give rise to the emergence of complex behaviors and patterns.…