Related papers: Sex and Coevolution
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the…
Sexual reproduction in Nature requires two sexes, which raises the question why the reproductive scheme did not evolve to have three or more sexes. Here we construct a constrained optimization model based on the communication theory to…
A trademark of eusocial insect species is reproductive division of labor, in which workers forego their own reproduction while the queen produces almost all offspring. The presence of the queen is key for maintaining social harmony, but the…
Sexual selection theory models evolution of sexual signals and preferences using simple life histories. However, life-history models predict that males benefit from increasing sexual investment approaching old age, producing age-dependent…
A two-type two-sex branching process is introduced with the aim of describing the interaction of predator and prey populations with sexual reproduction and promiscuous mating. In each generation and in each species the total number of…
In large asexual populations, multiple beneficial mutations arise in the population, compete, interfere with each other, and accumulate on the same genome, before any of them fix. The resulting dynamics, although studied by many authors, is…
Competition among gametes for fertilization imposes strong selection. For external fertilizers, this selective pressure extends to eggs for which spawning conditions can range from sperm limitation (competition among eggs) to sexual…
Most conspicuous organisms are multicellular and most multicellular organisms develop somatic cells to perform specific, non-reproductive tasks. The ubiquity of this division of labor suggests that it is highly advantageous. In this paper,…
Social insect colonies can be seen as a distinct form of biological organization because they function as superorganisms. Understanding how natural selection acts on the emergence and maintenance of these colonies remains a major question…
Sex chromosomes have independently evolved in species with separate sexes in most lineages across the tree of life. However, the well-accepted canonical model of sex chromosome evolution is not universally supported. There is no single…
Evolutionary game theory has traditionally assumed that all individuals in a population interact with each other between reproduction events. We show that eliminating this restriction by explicitly considering the time scales of interaction…
It has been suggested that major transitions in evolution require the emergence of novelties, often associated to the cooperative behaviour of previously existing objects or agents. A key innovation involves the first cooperative…
Cooperative coevolutionary algorithms (CCEAs) divide a given problem in to a number of subproblems and use an evolutionary algorithm to solve each subproblem. This short paper is concerned with the scenario under which only a single, global…
Herbivorous wild species constantly strive to optimize the trade-off between energy and nutrient intake and predation risk during foraging. This has led to the selection of several evolutionary traits -- such as diet, habitat selection, and…
Evolutionary graph theory is a well established framework for modelling the evolution of social behaviours in structured populations. An emerging consensus in this field is that graphs that exhibit heterogeneity in the number of connections…
At a theoretical level, the Trivers-Willard Sex Ratio Hypothesis applies to both avian species and mammals. This article, however, conjectures that at the statistical level, sex ratio effects are likely to produce sharper numerical…
In human societies the probability of strategy adoption from a given person may be affected by the personal features. Now we investigate how an artificially imposed restricted ability to reproduce, overruling ones fitness, affects an…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
We consider a system of interacting Fisher-Wright diffusions with seed-bank. Individuals live in colonies and are subject to resampling and migration as long as they are active. Each colony has a structured seed-bank into which individuals…