Related papers: Natural Selection as the sum over all histories
Biodiversity and extinction are central issues in evolution. Dynamical balance among different species in ecosystems is often described by deterministic replicator equations with moderate success. However, fluctuations are inevitable,…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…
A general principle is advanced allowing the classification of nonunique solutions to nonlinear evolution equations, corresponding to different spatio-temporal patterns. This is done by defining the probability distribution of patterns,…
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
Apparent biodiversity on earth exists only if we compare different species separated from their environments. Meanwhile coexisting species have to be identical in terms of energetic interactions. Consider the biosphere as a network of…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
We consider the evolution of a population of fixed size with no selection. The number of generations $G$ to reach the first common ancestor evolves in time. This evolution can be described by a simple Markov process which allows one to…
A model of genome evolution is proposed. Based on three assumptions the evolutionary theory of a genome is formulated. The general law on the direction of genome evolution is given. Both the deterministic classical equation and the…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
This paper demonstrates that simple yet important characteristics of coevolution can occur in evolutionary algorithms when only a few conditions are met. We find that interaction-based fitness measurements such as fitness (linear) ranking…
Weak selection, which means a phenotype is slightly advantageous over another, is an important limiting case in evolutionary biology. Recently it has been introduced into evolutionary game theory. In evolutionary game dynamics, the…
Under constant selection, each trait has a fixed fitness, and small mutation rates allow populations to efficiently exploit the optimal trait. Therefore it is reasonable to expect mutation rates will evolve downwards. However, we find this…
We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of…
A class of models for large-scale evolution and mass extinctions is presented. These models incorporate environmental changes on all scales, from influences on a single species to global effects. This is a step towards a unified picture of…
Our understanding of evolution is shaped strongly by how we conceive of its fundamental causes. In the original Modern Synthesis, evolution was defined as a process of shifting the frequencies of available alleles at many loci affecting a…
Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…