Related papers: Non-genetic variability: survival strategy or nuis…
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…
Behavioural differences may arise in the absence of genetic or environmental variation. Chaotic dynamics may influence behavioural development, and so this among-individual variation. We discuss methods and experimental designs to test this…
The effect of phenotypic plasticity on evolution, the so-called Baldwin effect, has been studied extensively for more than 100 years. Plasticity is known to influence the speed of evolution towards a specific genetic configuration, but…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Understanding under what conditions populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, persist is an issue of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and environmental fluctuations…
We examine the switching dynamics of a stochastic population subjected to a deterministically time-varying environment. Our approach is demonstrated in the realm of ecology on a problem of population establishment. Here, by assuming a…
Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…
We consider a stochastic individual-based model of adaptive dynamics for an asexually reproducing population with mutation. Biologically motivated by the influence of seasons or the variation of drug concentration during medical treatment,…
Most population models assume that individuals within a given population are identical, that is, the fundamental role of variation is ignored. Here we develop a general approach to modeling heterogeneous populations with discrete…
Evolutionary graph theory is a well established framework for modelling the evolution of social behaviours in structured populations. An emerging consensus in this field is that graphs that exhibit heterogeneity in the number of connections…
Biological organisms exhibit diverse strategies for adapting to varying environments. For example, a population of organisms may express the same phenotype in all environments (`unvarying strategy'), or follow environmental cues and express…
When biological populations expand into new territory, the evolutionary outcomes can be strongly influenced by genetic drift, the random fluctuations in allele frequencies. Meanwhile, spatial variability in the environment can also…
We review models of biological evolution in which the population frequency changes deterministically with time. If the population is self-replicating, although the equations for simple prototypes can be linearised, nonlinear equations arise…
Species introductions to new habitats can cause a decline in the population size of competing native species and consequently also in their genetic diversity. We are interested in why these adverse effects are weak in some cases whereas in…
Predicting fitness of biologically-active populations, communities or systems in fluctuating environments is a long-standing challenge. Phenotypic plasticity and bet-hedging strategy, two key evolutionary traits living systems harness to…
Understanding the mechanisms of species coexistence has always been a fundamental topic in ecology. Classical theory predicts that interspecific competition may select for traits that stabilize niche differences, although recent work shows…
Motivated by recent understandings in the stochastic natures of gene expression, biochemical signaling, and spontaneous reversible epigenetic switchings, we study a simple deterministic cell population dynamics in which subpopulations grow…
The diversity of cell populations is regulated by extracellular and intracellular variability. The latter includes genetic, epigenetic and stochastic variability, all contributing to the experimentally observed heterogeneity in response to…
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…
In this short communication, we shall explore a nonlinear discrete dynamical system that naturally occurs in population systems to describe a transmission of a trait from parents to their offspring. We consider a Mendelian inheritance for a…