Related papers: Competition-driven evolution of organismal complex…

The possibility of complicated dynamic behaviour driven by non-linear feedbacks in dynamical systems has revolutionized science in the latter part of the last century. Yet despite examples of complicated frequency dynamics, the possibility…

Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…

Explaining biodiversity in nature is a fundamental problem in ecology. An outstanding challenge is embodied in the so-called Competitive Exclusion Principle: two species competing for one limiting resource cannot coexist at constant…

Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…

Researchers have proposed that the distinction between so-called "simple" and "complex" societies can be expressed by an increase in the number of levels at which functional organization, interaction, and thus selection, operate. In spite…

Environmental variation can play an important role in ecological competition by influencing the relative advantage between competing species. Here, we consider such effects by extending a classical, competitive Moran model to incorporate an…

Biological systems reach hierarchical complexity that has no counterpart outside the realm of biology. Undoubtedly, biological entities obey the fundamental physical laws. Can today's physics provide an explanatory framework for…

Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…

Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…

Evolutionary complexity is here measured by the number of trials/evaluations needed for evolving a logical gate in a non-linear medium. Behavioural complexity of the gates evolved is characterised in terms of cellular automata behaviour. We…

Phenotypic fluctuations and plasticity can generally affect the course of evolution, a process known as the Baldwin effect. Several studies have recast this effect and claimed that phenotypic plasticity acceler- ates evolutionary rate (the…

We address a primary question of computational as well as biological research on evolution: How can an exploration strategy adapt in such a way as to exploit the information gained about the problem at hand? We first introduce an integrated…

Complex microbial habitats see the spatial competition of different clonal bacterial populations that switch between different phenotypes. Here, we determine the effect of this subpopulation structure on the invasion of one species by…

Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…

We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…

Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…

We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…

In this paper, we study an integro-differential equation which describes the evolutionary dynamics of a population structured by a phenotypic trait. This population undergoes asexual reproduction, competition, selection, and mutation. We…

`Entropy' appears as driving force in many different evolution equations, both deterministic and stochastic, and in these equations this `entropy' also takes different forms. We show how all these examples can be understood as different…

We define a novel quantitative strategy inspired by the ecological notion of nestedness to single out the scale at which innovation complexity emerges from the aggregation of specialized building blocks. Our analysis not only suggests that…