Related papers: Adapt or perish: Evolutionary rescue in a graduall…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Many species live in colonies that prosper for a while and then collapse. After the collapse the colony survivors disperse randomly and found new colonies that may or may not make it depending on the new environment they find. We use birth…
The persistence of life requires populations to adapt at a rate commensurate with the dynamics of their environment. Successful populations that inhabit highly variable environments have evolved mechanisms to increase the likelihood of…
We model and study the genetic evolution and conservation of a population of diploid hermaphroditic organisms, evolving continuously in time and subject to resource competition. In the absence of mutations, the population follows a 3-type…
In this paper we afford a quantitative analysis of the sustainability of current world population growth in relation to the parallel deforestation process adopting a statistical point of view. We consider a simplified model based on a…
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…
Evolutionary dynamics on graphs can lead to many interesting and counterintuitive findings. We study the Moran process, a discrete time birth-death process, that describes the invasion of a mutant type into a population of wild-type…
We are interested in the impact of natural selection in a prey-predator community. We introduce an individual-based model of the community that takes into account both prey and predator phenotypes. Our aim is to understand the phenotypic…
Linked beneficial and deleterious mutations are known to decrease the fixation probability of a favorable mutation in large asexual populations. While the hindering effect of strongly deleterious mutations on adaptive evolution has been…
We consider a biological population in which a beneficial mutation is undergoing a selective sweep when a second beneficial mutation arises at a linked locus and we investigate the probability that both mutations will eventually fix in the…
Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. To gain a fundamental understanding of resistance evolution, a combination of systematic experimental and theoretical approaches is required. Evolution experiments combined with…
The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…
Many biological populations exhibit diversity in their strategy for survival and reproduction in a given environment, and microbes are an example. We explore the fate of different strategies under sustained environmental change by…
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,…
We propose a simple model for genetic adaptation to a changing environment, describing a fitness landscape characterized by two maxima. One is associated with "specialist" individuals that are adapted to the environment; this maximum moves…
A population evolving in an inhomogeneous environment will adapt differently to different regions. We study the conditions under which such a population can maintain adaptations to a particular region when that region is not stationary, but…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
Sexually reproducing populations with small number of individuals may go extinct by stochastic fluctuations in sex determination, causing all their members to become male or female in a generation. In this work we calculate the time to…
Many mathematical models of evolution assume that all individuals experience the same environment. Here, we study the Moran process in heterogeneous environments. The population is of finite size with two competing types, which are exposed…
Cooperation is ubiquitous across all levels of biological systems ranging from microbial communities to human societies. It, however, seemingly contradicts the evolutionary theory, since cooperators are exploited by free-riders and thus are…