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Natural selection and random drift are competing phenomena for explaining the evolution of populations. Combining a highly fit mutant with a population structure that improves the odds that the mutant spreads through the whole population…
The significance and influence of US Supreme Court majority opinions derive in large part from opinions' roles as precedents for future opinions. A growing body of literature seeks to understand what drives the use of opinions as precedents…
Using a lattice model based on Monte Carlo simulations, we study the role of the reproduction pattern on the fate of an evolving population. Each individual is under the selection pressure from the environment and random mutations. The…
We examine what happens in a population when it experiences an abrupt change in surrounding conditions. Several cases of such "abrupt transitions" for both physical and living social systems are analyzed from which it can be seen that all…
Abortion has been one of the most divisive issues in the United States. Yet, missing is comprehensive longitudinal evidence on how political divides on abortion are reflected in public discourse over time, on a national scale, and in…
We consider the hypothesis that Evolution promotes population-wide genome patterns that, under randomization, ensures the External Validity of adaptations across population members. An adaptation is Externally Valid (EV) if its effect holds…
Genetic data are often used to infer demographic history and changes or detect genes under selection. Inferential methods are commonly based on models making various strong assumptions: demography and population structures are supposed…
We introduce the following model for the evolution of a population. At every discrete time $j\geq 0$ exactly one individual is introduced in the population and is assigned a death probability $c_j$ sampled from $C$, a fixed probability…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
This chapter focuses on variable maturation delay or, more precisely, on the mathematical description of a size-structured population consuming an unstructured resource. When the resource concentration is a known function of time, we can…
A branching process in random environment $(Z_n, n \in \N)$ is a generalization of Galton Watson processes where at each generation the reproduction law is picked randomly. In this paper we give several results which belong to the class of…
The rapid development of sequencing technologies represents new opportunities for population genetics research. It is expected that genomic data will increase our ability to reconstruct the history of populations. While this increase in…
Consider first a memoryless population model described by the usual branching process with a given mean reproduction matrix on a finite space of types. Motivated by the consequences of atavism in Evolutionary Biology, we are interested in a…
We analyze evolutionary dynamics on graphs, where the nodes represent individuals of a population. The links of a node describe which other individuals can be displaced by the offspring of the individual on that node. Amplifiers of…
We consider inventions as novel combinations of existing technological capabilities. Patent data allow us to explicitly identify such combinatorial processes in invention activities. Unconsidered in the previous research, not every new…
We consider the evolution of an asexually reproducing population in an uncorrelated random fitness landscape in the limit of infinite genome size, which implies that each mutation generates a new fitness value drawn from a probability…
Standard neutral population genetics theory with a strictly fixed population size has important limitations. An alternative model that allows independently fluctuating population sizes and reproduces the standard neutral evolution is…
We study individuals' willingness to engage with others who hold opposite views on polarizing policies. A representative sample of 2,507 Americans are given the opportunity to listen to recordings of fellow countrymen and women expressing…
Neutral evolution assumes that there are no selective forces distinguishing different variants in a population. Despite this striking assumption, many recent studies have sought to assess whether neutrality can provide a good description of…
We consider a stochastic individual-based model for the evolution of a haploid, asexually reproducing population. The space of possible traits is given by the vertices of a (possibly directed) finite graph $G=(V,E)$. The evolution of the…