Related papers: The Biological Anthropocene: rethinking novelty or…
How diversity is maintained in natural ecosystems is a long-standing question in Theoretical Ecology. By studying a system that combines ecological dynamics, heterogeneous interactions and spatial structure, we uncover a new mechanism for…
Until recently, much of the microbial world was hidden from view. A global research effort has changed this, unveiling and quantifying microbial diversity across enormous range of critically-important contexts, from the human microbiome, to…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
We present a game of interacting agents which mimics the complex dynamics found in many natural and social systems. These agents modify their strategies periodically, depending on their performances using genetic crossover mechanisms,…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
(1) Results of analysis of new sets of anthropogenic data are presented. They confirm earlier results of similar analyses. The expected and inevitable massive deceleration of human-induced global change process is demonstrated as an ongoing…
Biological approximations, which are universal for diverse species, are well known. With no other experimental data, their invariance to transformations from one species to another yields exact conservation (with respect to biological…
Human population is at the centre of research on global environmental change. On the one hand, population dynamics influence the environment and the global climate system through consumption-based carbon emissions. On the other hand, health…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living…
Modern biological tools have made it possible to unequivocally demonstrate the deep relationship among species in terms of genes and basic molecular mechanisms. In addition, results from genetic, physical and physiological approaches…
For billions of years, evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life, including humans. Evolution endowed humans with high intelligence, which allowed us to become one of the most successful species on the planet.…
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…
The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
The continuity of life and its evolution, we proposed, emerge from an interactive group process manifested in networks of interaction. We term this process \textit{survival-of-the-fitted}. Here, we reason that survival of the fitted results…
We discuss a simple model of co-evolution. In order to emphasise the effect of interaction between individuals the entire population is subjected to the same physical environment. Species are emergent structures and extinction, origination…
Many species engage in acts that could be called creative. However, human creativity is unique in that it has transformed our planet. Given that the anatomy of the human brain is not so different from that of the great apes, what enables us…
We live within an increasingly technological, information-laden environment for the first time in human evolution.This subjects us, and will continue to subject us in an accelerating fashion, to an unremitting exposure to meaningful…
We study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…