Related papers: Assortative pairing alone can lead to a structured…
Cooperation is ubiquitous across all levels of biological systems ranging from microbial communities to human societies. It, however, seemingly contradicts the evolutionary theory, since cooperators are exploited by free-riders and thus are…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
This paper is concerned with mathematical modeling of intelligent systems, such as human crowds and animal groups. In particular, the focus is on the emergence of different self-organized patterns from non-locality and anisotropy of the…
Using as a narrative theme the example of Darwin's finches, a microscopic agent-based model is introduces to study sympatric speciation as a result of competition for resources in the same ecological niche. Varying competition among…
Recent work has proven the existence of extreme inbreeding in a European ancestry sample taken from the contemporary UK population \cite{nature_01}. This result brings our attention again to a math problem related to inbreeding family trees…
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…
In this paper we consider a microscopic model of a simple ecosystem. The basic ingredients of this model are individuals, and both the phenotypic and genotypic levels are taken in account. The model is based on a long range cellular…
Axelrod model describes the dissemination of a set of cultural traits in a society constituted by individual agents. In a social context, nevertheless, individual choices toward a specific attitude are also at the basis of the formation of…
The interplay between space and evolution is an important issue in population dynamics, that is in particular crucial in the emergence of polymorphism and spatial patterns. Recently, biological studies suggest that invasion and evolution…
In collective robotic systems, the automatic generation of controllers for complex tasks is still a challenging problem. Open-ended evolution of complex robot behaviors can be a possible solution whereby an intrinsic driver for pattern…
Advances in field techniques have lead to an increase in spatially-referenced capture-recapture data to estimate a species' population size as well as other demographic parameters and patterns of space usage. Statistical models for these…
A standard belief on emerging collective behavior is that it emerges from simple individual rules. Most of the mathematical research on such collective behavior starts from imperative individual rules, like always go to the center. But how…
Parapatric speciation is studied using an individual--based model with sexual reproduction. We combine the theory of mutation accumulation for biological ageing with an environmental selection pressure that varies according to the…
In a geographically distributed population, assortative clustering plays an important role in evolution by modifying local environments. To examine its effects in a linear habitat, we consider a one-dimensional grid of cells, where each…
In many indigenous societies, people are categorised into several cultural groups, or clans, within which they believe to share ancestors. Clan attributions provide certain rules for marriage and descent. Such rules between clans constitute…
Cultural transmission models are coming to the fore in explaining increases in the Paleolithic toolkit richness and diversity. During the later Paleolithic, technologies increase not only in terms of diversity but also in their complexity…
Microbial ecosystems exhibit a surprising amount of functionally relevant diversity at all levels of taxonomic resolution, presenting a significant challenge for most modeling frameworks. A long-standing hope of theoretical ecology is that…
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.…
Despite the central role of self-assembled groups in animal and human societies, statistical tools to explain their composition are limited. We introduce a statistical framework for cross-sectional observations of groups with exclusive…
One of the most challenging issues of evolutionary biology concerns speciation, the emergence of new species from an initial one. The huge amount of species found in nature demands a simple and robust mechanism. Yet, no consensus has been…