Related papers: Anticipation: an effective evolutionary strategy f…
Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…
In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby…
We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
We study effects of strategy-dependent time delays on equilibria of evolving populations. It is well known that time delays may cause oscillations in dynamical systems. Here we report a novel behavior. We show that microscopic models of…
Much has been debated about the benefit of sexual over asexual reproduction in terms of evolutionary fitness. Here we focus on the advantage that may be brought about by the process of mating, where the choosing of mates contributes to the…
A population of individuals with the same genes can present heterogeneous traits (phenotypes). The prevalence of this heterogeneity can be explained as a bet-hedging strategy that improves the population proliferation rate (fitness) in…
We study a stochastic model proposed recently in the genetic literature to explain the heterogeneity of cell populations or of gene products. Cells are located in two colonies, whose sizes fluctuate as birth and migration processes in…
In evolutionary algorithms, the fitness of a population increases with time by mutating and recombining individuals and by a biased selection of more fit individuals. The right selection pressure is critical in ensuring sufficient…
Biological oscillators coordinate individual cellular components so that they function coherently and collectively. They are typically composed of multiple feedback loops, and period mismatch is unavoidable in biological implementations. We…
Biological organisms are adaptive, able to function in unpredictably changing environments. Drawing on recent nonequilibrium physics, we show that in adaptation, fitness has two components parameterized by observable coordinates: a static…
We present a spatially-extended system of chemical reactions exhibiting adaptation to time-dependent influxes of reactants. Here adaptation is defined as improved reproductive success, namely the ability of one of the many locally stable…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
Experimentalists have observed phenotypic variability in isogenic bacteria populations. We explore the hypothesis that in fluctuating environments this variability is tuned to maximize a bacterium's expected log growth rate, potentially…
Using a lattice model based on Monte Carlo simulations, we study the role of the reproduction pattern on the fate of an evolving population. Each individual is under the selection pressure from the environment and random mutations. The…
Decision-making individuals often imitate their highest-earning fellows rather than optimize their own utilities, due to bounded rationality and incomplete information. Perpetual fluctuations between decisions have been reported as the…
Identifying early warning signs of sudden population changes and mechanisms leading to regime shifts are highly desirable in population biology. In this paper, a two-trophic ecosystem comprising of two species of predators, competing for…
We consider a simple information-theoretic model of communication, in which two species of bacteria have the option of exchanging information about their environment, thereby improving their chances of survival. For this purpose, we model a…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
Identifying and quantifying the benefits of sex and recombination is a long standing problem in evolutionary theory. In particular, contradictory claims have been made about the existence of a benefit of recombination on high dimensional…