Related papers: Physical constraints on epistasis
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
The limiting slow dynamics of slow-fast, piecewise-linear, continuous systems of ODEs occurs on critical manifolds that are piecewise-linear. At points of non-differentiability, such manifolds are not normally hyperbolic and so the…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
Bacteria evolve in volatile environments and complex spatial structures. Migration, fluctuations and environmental variability therefore have a significant impact on the evolution of microbial populations. Here, we consider a class of…
Biological systems are modular, and this modularity evolves over time and in different environments. A number of observations have been made of increased modularity in biological systems under increased environmental pressure. We here…
A common assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing evolution of complexity appear more nuanced. Evolution is deeply connected to learning, where…
Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in an evolving population are punctuated by a sudden burst of change, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We analyze the population dynamics for a…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
The theory of slow manifolds is an important tool in the study of deterministic dynamical systems, giving a practical method by which to reduce the number of relevant degrees of freedom in a model, thereby often resulting in a considerable…
Soft solids with tunable mechanical response are at the core of new material technologies, but a crucial limit for applications is their progressive aging over time, which dramatically affects their functionalities. The generally accepted…
Phenotypic variation is a hallmark of cellular physiology. Metabolic heterogeneity, in particular, underpins single-cell phenomena such as microbial drug tolerance and growth variability. Much research has focussed on transcriptomic and…
In this paper we return to the problem of reduced-state dynamics in the presence of an interacting environment. The question we investigate is how to appropriately model a particular system evolution given some knowledge of the…
Traditionally, frequency dependent evolutionary dynamics is described by deterministic replicator dynamics assuming implicitly infinite population sizes. Only recently have stochastic processes been introduced to study evolutionary dynamics…
Every physical theory has (at least) two different forms of mathematical equations to represent its target systems: the dynamical (equations of motion) and the kinematical (kinematical constraints). Kinematical constraints are…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
One of the properties that make ecological systems so unique is the range of complex behavioural patterns that can be exhibited by even the simplest communities with only a few species. Much of this complexity is commonly attributed to…
The problem of understanding fundamental physical constants was discussed in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology. Here, I show that a new insight comes from condensed matter physics and liquid physics in particular: fundamental…
Discrete models have a long tradition in engineering, including finite state machines, Boolean networks, Petri nets, and agent-based models. Of particular importance is the question of how the model structure constrains its dynamics. This…
Since protein mutations are the main driving force of evolution at the molecular level, a proper analysis of them (and the factors controlling them) will enable us to find a response to several crucial queries in evolutionary biology. Among…
Biological networks have evolved to be highly functional within uncertain environments while remaining extremely adaptable. One of the main contributors to the robustness and evolvability of biological networks is believed to be their…