Related papers: Mechanisms of rapid evolution
Our understanding of evolution is shaped strongly by how we conceive of its fundamental causes. In the original Modern Synthesis, evolution was defined as a process of shifting the frequencies of available alleles at many loci affecting a…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
Evolution is a fundamental process that shapes the biological world we inhabit, and reinforcement learning is a powerful tool used in artificial intelligence to develop intelligent agents that learn from their environment. In recent years,…
The main topic of this thesis is the analysis of evolution equations reflecting issues in ecology and population dynamics. In mathematical modelling, the impact of environmental elements and the interaction between species is read into the…
Evolutionary transitions among ecological interactions are widely known, although their detailed dynamics remain absent for most population models. Adaptive dynamics has been used to illustrate how the parameters of population models might…
This paper focuses on the maximum speed at which biological evolution can occur. I derive inequalities that limit the rate of evolutionary processes driven by natural selection, mutations, or genetic drift. These \emph{rate limits} link the…
A class of models for large-scale evolution and mass extinctions is presented. These models incorporate environmental changes on all scales, from influences on a single species to global effects. This is a step towards a unified picture of…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
A simple model of macroevolution is proposed exhibiting both the property of punctuated equilibrium and the dynamics of potentialities for different species to evolve towards increasingly higher complexity. It is based on the phenomenon of…
Evolution is a dynamic process. The two classical forces of evolution are mutation and selection. Assuming small mutation rates, evolution can be predicted based solely on the fitness differences between phenotypes. Predicting an…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
This chapter begins by outlining a promising, new theoretical framework for the process by which human culture evolves inspired by the views of complexity theorists on the problem of how life began. Elements of culture, like species, evolve…
The Red Queen Hypothesis, which suggests that continual evolution can result from solely biotic interactions, has been studied in macroevolutionary and microevolutionary contexts. While the latter has been effective in describing examples…
Populations of replicating entities frequently experience sudden or cyclical changes in environment. We explore the implications of this phenomenon via a environmental switching parameter in several common evolutionary dynamics models…
To learn about the past from a sample of genomic sequences, one needs to understand how evolutionary processes shape genetic diversity. Most population genetic inference is based on frameworks assuming adaptive evolution is rare. But if…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…
In this paper, we wish to investigate the dynamics of information transfer in evolutionary dynamics. We use information theoretic tools to track how much information an evolving population has obtained and managed to retain about different…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…