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Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
The amplification cycle of many replicators (natural or artificial) involves the usage of a host compartment, inside of which the replicator express phenotypic compounds necessary to carry out its genetic replication. For example, viruses…
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 discuss a simple model of co-evolution. In order to emphasise the effect of interaction between individuals the entire population is subjected to the same physical environment. Species are emergent structures and extinction, origination…
Diversity is an important factor in evolutionary algorithms to prevent premature convergence towards a single local optimum. In order to maintain diversity throughout the process of evolution, various means exist in literature. We analyze…
Planning for the protection of species often involves difficult choices about which species to prioritize, given constrained resources. One way of prioritizing species is to consider their "evolutionary distinctiveness", i.e. their relative…
Understanding the patterns and processes of diversification of life in the planet is a key challenge of science. The Tree of Life represents such diversification processes through the evolutionary relationships among the different taxa, and…
Phenotypes of individuals in a population of organisms are not fixed. Phenotypic fluctuations, which describe temporal variation of the phenotype of an individual or individual-to-individual variation across a population, are present in…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
Phenotypic heterogeneity is a strategy commonly used by bacteria to rapidly adapt to changing environmental conditions. Here, we study the interplay between phenotypic heterogeneity and genetic diversity in spatially extended populations.…
The question what determines the structure of natural food webs has been listed among the nine most important unanswered questions in ecology. It arises naturally from many problems related to ecosystem stability and resilience. The…
The emergence and impact of tipping points have garnered significant interest in both the social and natural sciences. Despite widespread recognition of the importance of feedbacks between human and natural systems, it is often assumed that…
The effects of climate change, urbanisation and agriculture are changing the way insects occupy habitats. Some species may utilise anthropogenic microhabitat features for their existence, either because they prefer them to natural features,…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
The evolutionary relationships among organisms have traditionally been represented using rooted phylogenetic trees. However, due to reticulate processes such as hybridization or lateral gene transfer, evolution cannot always be adequately…
Patterns of nestedness and specialization asymmetry, where specialist species interact mainly with generalists while generalists interact with both generalists and specialists, are often observed in mutualistic and antagonistic bi-partite…
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…
Phylogenetic networks extend phylogenetic trees to allow for modeling reticulate evolutionary processes such as hybridization. They take the shape of a rooted, directed, acyclic graph, and when parameterized with evolutionary parameters,…
Evolutionary algorithms have been successfully applied to a variety of optimisation problems in stationary environments. However, many real world optimisation problems are set in dynamic environments where the success criteria shifts…