Related papers: Mechanisms of rapid evolution
Habitat loss, driven primarily by anthropogenic activity, significantly threatens ecosystem sustainability. While it is well understood that habitat loss is the leading contributor to declines in biodiversity worldwide, the connection…
We introduce a model designed to account for the influence of a line with fast diffusion-such as a road or another transport network-on the dynamics of a population in an ecological niche. This model consists of a system of coupled…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
We develop a ``unified'' model that describes both ``micro'' and ``macro'' evolutions within a single theoretical framework. The eco-system is described as a dynamic network; the population dynamics at each node of this network describes…
In this work, we characterize the solution of a system of elliptic integro-differential equations describing a phenotypically structured population subject to mutation, selection and migration between two habitats. Assuming that the effects…
This manuscript contains nothing new, but synthesizes known results: For the theoretical population geneticist with a probabilistic background, we provide a summary of some key results on stochastic differential equations. For the…
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…
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…
We are interested in modelling Darwinian evolution, resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. Our models are rooted in the microscopic, stochastic description of a population…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
We present an approximate analytic study of our previously introduced model of evolution including the effects of genetic exchange. This model is motivated by the process of bacterial transformation. We solve for the velocity, the rate of…
One of the main properties of biological systems is modularity, which manifests itself at all levels of their organization, starting with the level of molecular genetics, ending with the level of whole organisms and their communities. In a…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
Until recently, much of the microbial world was hidden from view. A global research effort has changed this, unveiling and quantifying microbial diversity across enormous range of critically-important contexts, from the human microbiome, to…
We seek to model the coupled evolution of a planet and a civilization through the era when energy harvesting by the civilization drives the planet into new and adverse climate states. In this way we ask if triggering "anthropocenes" of the…
Many species engage in acts that could be called creative. However, human creativity is unique in that it has transformed our planet. Given that the anatomy of the human brain is not so different from that of the great apes, what enables us…
These notes introduce probabilistic landscape models defined on high-dimensional discrete sequence spaces. The models are motivated primarily by fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology, but links to statistical physics and computer…
In a standard bifurcation of a dynamical system, the stationary points (or more generally attractors) change qualitatively when varying a control parameter. Here we describe a novel unusual effect, when the change of a parameter, e.g. a…