Related papers: Nature-nurture interplay in educational attainment

For a pair consisting of a gene tree and a species tree, the ancestral configurations at an internal node of the species tree are the distinct sets of gene lineages that can be present at that node. Ancestral configurations appear in…

Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…

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…

We represent a process of learning by using bit strings, where 1-bits represent the knowledge acquired by individuals. Two ways of learning are considered: individual learning by trial-and-error; and social learning by copying knowledge…

Social contexts -- such as families, schools, and neighborhoods -- shape life outcomes. The key question is not simply whether they matter, but rather for whom and under what conditions. Here, we argue that prediction gaps -- differences in…

We consider a setting where a population of artificial learners is given, and the objective is to optimize aggregate measures of performance, under constraints on training resources. The problem is motivated by the study of peer learning in…

The idea of incompetence as a learning or adaptation function was introduced in the context of evolutionary games as a fixed parameter. However, live organisms usually perform different nonlinear adaptation functions such as a power law or…

We propose a causal analysis of the mother's educational level on the health status of the newborn, in terms of gestational weeks and weight. The analysis is based on a finite mixture structural equation model, the parameters of which have…

The prediction of phenotypic traits using high-density genomic data has many applications such as the selection of plants and animals of commercial interest; and it is expected to play an increasing role in medical diagnostics. Statistical…

Phylogenetic diversity indices such as the Fair Proportion (FP) index are frequently discussed as prioritization criteria in biodiversity conservation. They rank species according to their contribution to overall diversity by taking into…

Strategic classification studies the design of a classifier robust to the manipulation of input by strategic individuals. However, the existing literature does not consider the effect of competition among individuals as induced by the…

We study the statistics of ecosystems with a variable number of co-evolving species. The species interact in two ways: by prey-predator relationships and by direct competition with similar kinds. The interaction coefficients change slowly…

Improving undergraduate success in STEM requires identifying actionable factors that impact student outcomes, allowing institutions to prioritize key leverage points for change. We examined academic, demographic, and institutional factors…

This paper investigates the mechanisms underlying scientific stratification in the era of transition from elite to mass science. Existing scholarship has largely examined scientific stratification through the Matthew effect framework at the…

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…

The concept of "stochastic precedence" between two real-valued random variables has often emerged in different applied frameworks. In this paper we consider a slightly more general, and completely natural, concept of stochastic precedence…

We investigate how the pattern of contacts between species in mutualistic ecosystems is affected by the phylogenetic proximity between the species of each guild. We develop several theoretical tools to measure that effect and we use them to…

Determining how scientific achievements influence the subsequent process of knowledge creation is a fundamental step in order to build a unified ecosystem for studying the dynamics of innovation and competitiveness. Relying separately on…

We investigate the competing effects and relative importance of intrinsic demographic and environmental variability on the evolutionary dynamics of a stochastic two-species Lotka-Volterra model by means of Monte Carlo simulations on a…

The exponentially growing number of scientific papers stimulates a discussion on the interplay between quantity and quality in science. In particular, one may wonder which publication strategy may offer more chances of success: publishing…