Related papers: Sex and Coevolution
Spatial extent is a complicating factor in mathematical biology. The possibility that an action at point A cannot immediately affect what happens at point B creates the opportunity for spatial nonuniformity. This nonuniformity must change…
Evolutionary game theory is an abstract and simple, but very powerful way to model evolutionary dynamics. Even complex biological phenomena can sometimes be abstracted to simple two-player games. But often, the interaction between several…
Consider a population of organisms that harvest free energy from their environment to reproduce. This paper shows that if the organisms' reproductive rates are proportional to the amount of physical free energy that they can convert into…
Evolutionary adaptation is often likened to climbing a hill or peak. While this process is simple for fitness landscapes where mutations are independent, the interaction between mutations (epistasis) as well as mutations at loci that affect…
Background: Recent experimental and theoretical studies have shown that small asexual populations evolving on complex fitness landscapes may achieve a higher fitness than large ones due to the increased heterogeneity of adaptive…
Understanding how species interactions shape biodiversity is a core challenge in ecology. While much focus has been on long-term stability, there is rising interest in transient dynamics-the short-lived periods when ecosystems respond to…
Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…
We study the evolution of the network properties of a populated network embedded in a genotype space characterised by either a low or a high number of potential links, with particular emphasis on the connectivity and clustering. Evolution…
Genetic interactions can strongly influence the fitness effects of individual mutations, yet the impact of these epistatic interactions on evolutionary dynamics remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the evolutionary role of…
Lampreys are one of the oldest species in the world, living longer than dinosaurs, which is related to the ability to change the sex ratio during their lifespan. In this paper, to understand how sex ratio and food quantity affect the…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…
We introduce a new interacting particle system intended to model an example of ecological succession involving two species: the bracken and the european beech. The objective is to exhibit phase transitions by proving that there exist three…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
We suggest a novel approach to treating symbiotic relations between biological species or social entities. The main idea is the characterisation of symbiotic relations of coexisting species through their mutual influence on their respective…
Sex determination in the order Hymenoptera is based on arrhenotoky, hymenopteran males are usually haploid and females diploid. Males of the Ichneumonidae Diadromus pulchellus, solitary endoparasitoid of A. assectella pupae are normally…
Due to the relevance for conservation biology, there is an increasing interest to extend evolutionary genomics models to plant, animal or microbial species. However, this requires to understand the effect of life-history traits absent in…
The adaptation of biological species to their environment depends on their traits. When various biological processes occur (survival, reproduction, migration, etc.), the trait distribution may change with respect to time and space. In the…
Evolutionary game dynamics is one of the most fruitful frameworks for studying evolution in different disciplines, from Biology to Economics. Within this context, the approach of choice for many researchers is the so-called replicator…
For asexual organisms point mutations correspond to local displacements in the genotypic space, while other genotypic rearrangements represent long-range jumps. We investigate the spreading properties of an initially homogeneous population…
Same-sex sexual behavior is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, but its adaptive origins remain a prominent puzzle. Here I suggest the possibility that same-sex sexual behavior arises as a consequence of the competition between an…