Related papers: Improve it or lose it: evolvability costs of compe…
Biological populations are subject to two types of noise: demographic stochasticity due to fluctuations in the reproductive success of individuals, and environmental variations that affect coherently the relative fitness of entire…
Unambiguous identification of the rewards driving behaviours of entities operating in complex open-ended real-world environments is difficult, partly because goals and associated behaviours emerge endogenously and are dynamically updated as…
Environmental changes play a critical role in determining the evolution of social dilemmas in many natural or social systems. Generally, the environmental changes include two prominent aspects: the global time-dependent fluctuations and the…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Considerable evidence suggests that anticipating sudden shifts from one state to another in bistable dynamical systems is a challenging task, examples include ecosystems, financial markets, complex diseases, etc. In this paper, we…
The characterization of plasticity, robustness, and evolvability, an important issue in biology, is studied in terms of phenotypic fluctuations. By numerically evolving gene regulatory networks, the proportionality between the phenotypic…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
Aging is thought to be a consequence of intrinsic breakdowns in how genetic information is processed. But mounting experimental evidence suggests that aging can be slowed. To help resolve this mystery, I derive a mortality equation which…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
The modelling of evolutionary game dynamics in finite populations requires microscopic processes that determine how strategies spread. The exact details of these processes are often chosen without much further consideration. Different types…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…
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…
Human society and natural environment form a complex giant ecosystem, where human activities not only lead to the change of environmental states, but also react to them. By using collective-risk social dilemma game, some studies have…
Stochastic phenotype switching has been suggested to play a beneficial role in microbial populations by leading to the division of labour among cells, or ensuring that at least some of the population survives an unexpected change in…
We numerically investigate the impact of scale evolution on double parton distributions, which are needed to compute multiple hard scattering processes. Assuming correlations between longitudinal and transverse variables or between the…
In many situations, the gene expression signature is a unique marker of the biological state. We study the modification of the gene expression distribution function when the biological state of a system experiences a change. This change may…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Non-uniform rates of morphological evolution and evolutionary increases in organismal complexity, captured in metaphors like "adaptive zones", "punctuated equilibrium" and "blunderbuss patterns", require more elaborate explanations than a…
Protein evolution underpins life, and understanding its behavior as a system is of great importance. However, our current models of protein evolution are arguably too simplistic to allow quantitative interpretation and prediction of…
Developmental trajectories are known to be canalized, or robust to both environmental and genetic perturbations. However, even when these trajectories are decanalized by an environmental perturbation outside of the range of conditions to…