Related papers: Anticipation: an effective evolutionary strategy f…
Evolution depends on the fitness of organisms, the expected rate of reproducing. Directly getting offspring is the most basic form of fitness, but fitness can also be increased indirectly by helping genetically related individuals (such as…
Global change is reshaping ecosystems and societies. Strategic choices that were best yesterday may be sub-optimal tomorrow; and environmental conditions that were once taken for granted may soon cease to exist. In this setting, how people…
The goal of this article is to contribute towards the conceptual and quantitative understanding of the evolutionary benefits for (microbial) populations to maintain a seed bank (consisting of dormant individuals) when facing fluctuating…
We consider an asexual population under strong selection-weak mutation conditions evolving on rugged fitness landscapes with many local fitness peaks. Unlike the previous studies in which the initial fitness of the population is assumed to…
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…
Decision-making individuals are typically either an imitator, who mimics the action of the most successful individual(s), a conformist (or coordinating individual), who chooses an action if enough others have done so, or a nonconformist (or…
Organisms gain by anticipating future changes in the environment. Those environmental changes often follow stochastic trends. The greater the slope of the trend, the more likely the trend's momentum carries the future trend in the same…
We study optimal two-sector (vegetative and reproductive) allocation models of annual plants in temporally variable environments, that incorporate effects of density dependent lifetime variability and juvenile mortality in a fitness…
Cells generally convert nutrient resources to useful products via energy transduction. Accordingly, the thermodynamic efficiency of this conversion process is one of the most essential characteristics of living organisms. However, although…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
We study a model for the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) used by biological populations for choosing the time of life-history events, such as migration and breeding. In our model we accounted for both intra-species competition (early…
The interdependence between an individual strategy decision and the resulting change of environmental state is often a subtle process. Feedback-evolving games have been a prevalent framework for studying such feedback in well-mixed…
Mixed dispersal syndromes have historically been regarded as bet-hedging mechanisms that enhance survival in unpredictable environments, ensuring that some propagules stay in the maternal environment while others can potentially colonize…
We propose a simple model for genetic adaptation to a changing environment, describing a fitness landscape characterized by two maxima. One is associated with "specialist" individuals that are adapted to the environment; this maximum moves…
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 systems perform complex multi-step processes in a reproducible way despite underlying stochasticity. The standard explanation is micromanagement by molecular machinery that recognizes and corrects specific errors. Here we study…
Individual choices are either based on personal experience or on information provided by peers. The latter case, causes individuals to conform to the majority in their neighborhood. Such herding behavior may be very efficient in aggregating…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. In stochastic descriptions of evolutionary dynamics, such as the Moran process, individuals are chosen randomly for birth and for death. If the same type is chosen for both steps,…
We consider a fixed size population that undergoes an evolutionary adaptation in the weak mutuation rate limit, which we model as a biased Langevin process in the genotype space. We show analytically and numerically that, if the fitness…