Related papers: Competition-driven evolution of organismal complex…
This publication reviews the framework of abstract competition, which is aimed at studying complex systems with competition in their generic form. Although the concept of abstract competition has been derived from a specific field -…
Understanding the relationship between taxonomic and morphological changes is important in identifying the reasons for accelerated morphological diversification early in the history of animal phyla. Here, a simple general model describing…
We introduce and analyse an individual-based evolutionary model, in which a population of genetically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources. Through theoretical analysis and stochastic simulations, we show that the…
Why evolvability appears to have increased over evolutionary time is an important unresolved biological question. Unlike most candidate explanations, this paper proposes that increasing evolvability can result without any pressure to adapt.…
We are interested in modeling the Darwinian evolution resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions, in the specific scales of the biological framework of adaptive dynamics.…
A new delay equation is introduced to describe the punctuated evolution of complex nonlinear systems. A detailed analytical and numerical investigation provides the classification of all possible types of solutions for the dynamics of a…
Microbial ecosystems are commonly modeled by fixed interactions between species in steady exponential growth states. However, microbes often modify their environments so strongly that they are forced out of the exponential state into…
Horizontal transfer (HT) of heritable information or `traits' (carried by genetic elements, endosymbionts, or culture) is widespread among living organisms. Yet current ecological and evolutionary theory addressing HT is limited. We present…
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…
Phenotypic plasticity and its evolution may help evolutionary rescue in a novel and stressful environment, especially if environmental novelty reveals cryptic genetic variation that enables the evolution of increased plasticity. However,…
In complex ecosystems such as microbial communities, there is constant ecological and evolutionary feedback between the residing species and the environment occurring on concurrent timescales. Species respond and adapt to their surroundings…
We consider an individual based model of phenotypic evolution in hermaphroditic populations which includes random and assortative mating of individuals. By increasing the number of individuals to infinity we obtain a nonlinear transport…
We study a version of the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology redefined in a phenotype space where mutants have properties correlated to their parents. The model has individual-based dynamics whilst incorporating species scale…
In models for the evolution of predation from initially purely competitive species interactions, the propensity of predation is most often assumed to be a direct consequence of the relative morphological and physiological traits of…
Existing studies comparing individual-based models of growing cell populations and their continuum counterparts have mainly focused on homogeneous populations, in which all cells have the same phenotypic characteristics. However,…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…
Given an endogenous timescale set by invasion in a constant environment, we introduced periodic temporal variation in competitive superiority by alternating the species' propagation rates. By manipulating habitat size and introduction rate,…
This paper introduces a variational formulation of natural selection, paying special attention to the nature of "things" and the way that different "kinds" of "things" are individuated from - and influence - each other. We use the Bayesian…
Environmental heterogeneity can drive genetic heterogeneity in expanding populations; mutant strains may emerge that trade overall growth rate for an improved ability to survive in patches that are hostile to the wild type. This…