Related papers: The Biological Anthropocene: rethinking novelty or…
This chapter begins by outlining a promising, new theoretical framework for the process by which human culture evolves inspired by the views of complexity theorists on the problem of how life began. Elements of culture, like species, evolve…
We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…
Interaction with its immediate environment determines the ecology of an organism. Species present in any habitat, wild or urban, may face extreme pressure due to sudden perturbations. When such disturbances are unpredictable, it becomes…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
Biological organisms adapt to changes by processing informations from different sources, most notably from their ancestors and from their environment. We review an approach to quantify these informations by analyzing mathematical models of…
One of the main properties of biological systems is modularity, which manifests itself at all levels of their organization, starting with the level of molecular genetics, ending with the level of whole organisms and their communities. In a…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
The accelerated path of technological development, particularly at the interface between hardware and biology has been suggested as evidence for future major technological breakthroughs associated to our potential to overcome biological…
Evolution gave rise to creatures that are arguably more sophisticated than the greatest human-designed systems. This feat has inspired computer scientists since the advent of computing and led to optimization tools that can evolve complex…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
We present numerical results based on a simplified ecological system in evolution, showing features of extinction similar to that claimed for the biosystem on Earth. In the model each species consists of a population in interaction with the…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…
Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs,…
The Anthropocene is characterized by close interdependencies between the natural Earth system and the human society, posing novel challenges to model development. Here we present a conceptual model describing the long-term coevolution of…
Mixed microbial communities, usually composed of various bacterial and fungal species, are fundamental in a plethora of environments, from soil to human gut and skin. Their evolution is a paradigmatic example of intertwined dynamics, where…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
The interpretation of recent environmental genomics data exposes the far-reaching influence of horizontal gene transfer, and is changing our basic concepts of organism, species and evolution itself.
Whether or not biodiversity dynamics tend toward stable equilibria remains an unsolved question in ecology and evolution with important implications for our understanding of diversity and its conservation. Phylo/population genetic models…