Related papers: How neutral and niche forces contribute to speciat…
The relationship between sequences and secondary structures or shapes in RNA exhibits robust statistical properties summarized by three notions: (1) the notion of a typical shape (that among all sequences of fixed length certain shapes are…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
Evolutionary dynamics can be studied in well-mixed or structured populations. Population structure typically arises from the heterogeneous distribution of individuals in physical space or on social networks. Here we introduce a new type of…
We introduce an analytical model for population dynamics with intra-specific competition, mutation and assortative mating as basic ingredients. The set of equations that describes the time evolution of population size in a mean-field…
In stochastic evolutionary dynamics, the replacement of an existing genotype or cultural trait by a newly introduced mutant is typically characterized by the quantities of fixation probability and fixation time. But in a structured…
In complex ecological communities, species may self-organize into clusters or clumps where highly similar species can coexist. The emergence of such species clusters can be captured by the interplay between neutral and niche theories. Based…
The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
Frequency-dependent selection reflects the interaction between different species as they battle for limited resources in their environment. In a stochastic evolutionary game the species relative fitnesses guides the evolutionary dynamics…
We are interested in the impact of natural selection in a prey-predator community. We introduce an individual-based model of the community that takes into account both prey and predator phenotypes. Our aim is to understand the phenotypic…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of a population structured in phenotype, subjected to trait dependent selection with a linearly moving optimum and an asexual mode of reproduction. Our model consists of a non-local and non-linear…
Competition between individuals drives the evolution of whole species. Although the fittest individuals survive the longest and produce the most offspring, in some circumstances the resulting species may not be optimally fit. Here, using…
Cryptic genetic sequences have attenuated effects on phenotypes. In the classic view, relaxed selection allows cryptic genetic diversity to build up across individuals in a population, providing alleles that may later contribute to…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…
We give a overview of stochastic models of evolution that have found applications in genetics, ecology and linguistics for an audience of nonspecialists, especially statistical physicists. In particular, we focus mostly on neutral models in…
We are interested in modeling some two-level population dynamics, resulting from the interplay of ecological interactions and phenotypic variation of individuals (or hosts) and the evolution of cells (or parasites) of two types living in…
The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…
Diverse communities of competing species are generally characterized by substantial niche overlap and strongly stochastic dynamics. Abundance fluctuations are proportional to population size, so the dynamics of rare populations is slower.…
This paper introduces a variational formulation of natural selection, paying special attention to the nature of "things" and the way that different "kinds" of "things" are individuated from - and influence - each other. We use the Bayesian…