Related papers: Diversity patterns and speciation processes in a t…
Diverse communities of competing species are generally characterized by substantial niche overlap and strongly stochastic dynamics. Abundance fluctuations are proportional to population size, so the dynamics of rare populations is slower.…
Patterns of isolation-by-distance arise when population differentiation increases with increasing geographic distances. Patterns of isolation-by-distance are usually caused by local spatial dispersal, which explains why differences of…
Global, population-wide oscillations in models of cyclic dominance may result in the collapse of biodiversity due to the accidental extinction of one species in the loop. Previous research has shown that such oscillations can emerge if the…
In genetic drift of small population, it is well known that even when the ratio of alleles is 0.5, specific genes are fixed in or disappear from the population. It seems the reason why inbreeding is avoided. On the other hand, this…
Diversity is an important factor in evolutionary algorithms to prevent premature convergence towards a single local optimum. In order to maintain diversity throughout the process of evolution, various means exist in literature. We analyze…
Several mating restriction techniques have been implemented in Evolutionary Algorithms to promote diversity. From similarity-based selection to niche preservation, the general goal is to avoid premature convergence by not having fitness…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
Complex spatial structure, with partially isolated subpopulations, and environment heterogeneity, such as gradients in nutrients, oxygen, and drugs, both shape the evolution of natural populations. We investigate the impact of environment…
The isolation-with-migration (IM) model is a common tool to make inferences about the presence of gene flow during speciation, using polymorphism data. However, Becquet and Przeworski (2009) report that the parameter estimates obtained by…
New automated and high-throughput methods allow the manipulation and selection of numerous bacterial populations. In this manuscript we are interested in the neutral diversity patterns that emerge from such a setup in which many bacterial…
Selective sweeps affect neutral genetic diversity through hitchhiking. While this effect is limited to the local genomic region of the sweep in panmictic populations, we find that in spatially-extended populations the combined effects of…
Despite its radical assumption of ecological equivalence between species, neutral biodiversity theory can often provide good fits to species abundance distributions observed in nature. Major criticisms of neutral theory have focused on…
The diversity revealed by large scale genomics in microbiology is calling into question long held beliefs about genome stability, evolutionary rate, even the definition of a species. MacArthur and Wilson's theory of insular biogeography…
We present an individual based model of evolutionary ecology. The reproduction rate of individuals characterized by their genome depends on the composition of the population in genotype space. Ecological features such as the taxonomy and…
Migrations have played an important role in shaping the genetic diversity of human populations. Understanding genomic data thus requires careful modeling of historical gene flow. Here we consider the effect of relatively recent population…
Dispersal of species to find a more favorable habitat is important in population dynamics. Dispersal rates evolve in response to the relative success of different dispersal strategies. In a simplified deterministic treatment (J. Dockery, V.…
In apparent contradiction to competition theory, the number of known, co-existing plankton species far exceeds their explicable biodiversity - a discrepancy termed the Paradox of the Plankton. We introduce a new game-theoretic model for…
Dispersal between different habitats influences the dynamics and stability of populations considerably. Furthermore, these effects depend on the local interactions of a population with other species. Here, we perform a general and…
We discuss two different ways of chromosomes' and genomes' evolution. Purifying selection dominates in large panmictic populations, where Mendelian law of independent gene assortment is valid. If the populations are small, recombination…
We study a stochastic model proposed recently in the genetic literature to explain the heterogeneity of cell populations or of gene products. Cells are located in two colonies, whose sizes fluctuate as birth and migration processes in…