Related papers: Mechanisms of rapid evolution
It is increasingly evident that there is more to biological evolution than natural selection; moreover, the concept of evolution is not limited to biology. We propose an integrative framework for characterizing how entities evolve, in which…
A stochastic model for the evolution of a growing population is proposed, in order to explain empirical power-law distributions in the frequency of family names as a function of the family size. Preliminary results show that the predicted…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
The preferred conditions for evolutionary innovation is a fundamental question, but little is known, in part because the question involves rare events. We focused on the potential role of polyploidy in the evolution of novel traits. There…
Models in evolutionary game theory traditionally assume symmetric interactions in homogeneous environments. Here, we consider populations evolving in a heterogeneous environment, which consists of patches of different qualities that are…
Natural evolution gives the impression of leading to an open-ended process of increasing diversity and complexity. If our goal is to produce such open-endedness artificially, this suggests an approach driven by evolutionary metaphor. On the…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
We study the qualitative properties of population cycles in a predator-prey system where genetic variability allows contemporary rapid evolution of the prey. Previous numerical studies have found that prey evolution in response to changing…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…
How does the interplay between selection, mutation and horizontal gene transfer modify the phenotypic distribution of a bacterial or cell population? While horizontal gene transfer, which corresponds to the exchange of genetic material…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
This dedicated journal collection will present and discuss a variety of science cases that can be used to extend our knowledge of massive stars and the influence of their rapid rotation on their subsequent evolution. The aim is to build…
Unraveling the evolutionary forces shaping bacterial diversity can today be tackled using a growing amount of genomic data. While the genome of eukaryotes is highly stable, bacterial genomes from cells of the same species highly vary in…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…
The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in different contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the essential dynamics of survival analysis,…
Evolutionary forces shape patterns of genetic diversity within populations and contribute to phenotypic variation. In particular, recurrent positive selection has attracted significant interest in both theoretical and empirical studies.…
We study in detail a recently proposed simple discrete model for evolution on smooth landscapes. An asymptotic solution of this model for long times is constructed. We find that the dynamics of the population are governed by correlation…
The adaptive evolution of large asexual populations is generally characterized by competition between clones carrying different beneficial mutations. This interference phenomenon slows down the adaptation speed and makes the theoretical…
The observable characteristics and subsequent evolution of young stellar populations is dominated by their massive stars. As our understanding of those massive stars and the factors affecting their evolution improves, so our interpretation…
We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…