Related papers: The world is not a theorem
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although 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…
The basic mechanics of evolution have been understood since Darwin. But debate continues over whether macroevolutionary phenomena are driven primary by the fitness structure of genotype space or by ecological interaction. In this paper we…
Darwinian Theory depicts life as being overwhelmingly consumed by a fight for survival in a hostile environment. However, from a thermodynamic perspective, life is a dynamic, out of equilibrium process, stabilizing and coevolving in concert…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
In their recent comment, Cockell et al. argue that the habitability of an environment is fundamentally a binary property; that is to say, an environment can either support the metabolic processes of a given organism or not. The habitability…
Do ecosystems primarily reflect evolutionary history or current environment? Predicting land-atmosphere exchange hinges on this unresolved question. Plant traits adapt to particular environments over evolutionary timescales, yet their…
Recent microbial experiments suggest that enhanced genetic drift at the frontier of a two-dimensional range expansion can cause genetic sectoring patterns with fractal domain boundaries. Here, we propose and analyze a simple model of…
One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…
How do we know that a kitchen is a kitchen by looking? Relatively little is known about how we conceptualize and categorize different visual environments. Traditional models of visual perception posit that scene categorization is achieved…
Global change is reshaping ecosystems and societies. Strategic choices that were best yesterday may be sub-optimal tomorrow; and environmental conditions that were once taken for granted may soon cease to exist. In this setting, how people…
We introduce the concept of an abstract evolution system, which provides a convenient framework for studying generic mathematical structures and their properties. Roughly speaking, an evolution system is a category endowed with a selected…
Understanding the evolution of cooperation is pivotal in biology and social science. Public resources sharing is a common scenario in the real world. In our study, we explore the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation on a regular graph with…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
A microscopic agent dynamical model for diploid age-structured populations is used to study evolution of polymorphism and sympatric speciation. The underlying ecology is represented by a unimodal distribution of resources of some width.…
The intricacy and diversity inherent in living organisms present a formidable obstacle to the establishment of a universally accepted definition. Life manifests in a multitude of forms, exhibiting various attributes such as growth,…
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…
Evolutionary games on graphs play an important role in the study of evolution of cooperation in applied biology. Using rigorous mathematical concepts from a dynamical systems and graph theoretical point of view, we formalize the notions of…
We introduce the notion of evolution on sets and study several sets endowed with this structure and obtain some results about this new notion.