Related papers: Competition-driven evolution of organismal complex…

Why, contrary to theoretical predictions, do marine microbe communities harbor tremendous phenotypic heterogeneity? How can so many marine microbe species competing in the same niche coexist? We discovered a unifying explanation for both…

At what level does selective pressure effectively act? When considering the reproductive dynamics of interacting and mutating agents, it has long been debated whether selection is better understood by focusing on the individual or if…

A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…

This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the…

Much of our understanding of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms derives from analysis of low-dimensional models: with few interacting species, or few axes defining "fitness". It is not always clear to what extent the intuition derived…

During bouts of evolutionary diversification, such as adaptive radiations, the emerging species cluster around different locations in phenotype space, How such multimodal patterns in phenotype space can emerge from a single ancestral…

Plasticity-led evolution is a form of evolution where a change in the environment induces novel traits via phenotypic plasticity, after which the novel traits are genetically accommodated over generations under the novel environment. This…

If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…

Developmental trajectories are known to be canalized, or robust to both environmental and genetic perturbations. However, even when these trajectories are decanalized by an environmental perturbation outside of the range of conditions to…

Ecological and evolutionary dynamics have been historically regarded as unfolding at broadly separated timescales. However, these two types of processes are nowadays well documented to much more tightly than traditionally assumed,…

Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…

The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…

This paper demonstrates that simple yet important characteristics of coevolution can occur in evolutionary algorithms when only a few conditions are met. We find that interaction-based fitness measurements such as fitness (linear) ranking…

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…

Rare evolutionary events, such as the rise to prominence of deleterious mutations, can have drastic impacts on the evolution of growing populations. Heterogeneous environments may reduce the influence of selection on evolutionary outcomes…

Ecological systems are emergent features of ecological and adaptive dynamics of a community of interacting species. By natural selection through the abiotic environment and by co-adaptation within the community, species evolve, thereby…

Ecological trade-offs between species are often invoked to explain species coexistence in ecological communities. However, few mathematical models have been proposed for which coexistence conditions can be characterized explicitly in terms…

A tumor can be thought of as an ecosystem, which critically means that we cannot just consider it as a collection of mutated cells but more as a complex system of many interacting cellular and microenvironmental elements. At its simplest, a…

With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…

In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…