Related papers: The value of internal memory for population growth…

Active systems across scales, ranging from molecular machines to human crowds, are usually modeled as assemblies of self-propelled particles driven by internally generated forces. However, these models often assume memoryless dynamics and…

Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on…

Dormancy is a widespread adaptive strategy that enables populations to persist in fluctuating environments, yet how its benefits depend on the temporal structure of environmental variability remains unclear. We examine how dormancy…

In a co-evolutionary context, the survive probability of individual elements of a system depends on their relation with their neighbors. The natural selection process depends on the whole population, which is determined by local events…

The growth rate of organisms depends both on external conditions and on internal states, such as the expression levels of various genes. We show that to achieve a criterion mean growth rate over an ensemble of conditions, the internal…

The dynamics of populations is rich, taking into account that both, the individual's actions and the population's fitness are coupled. The way in which an individual chooses a strategy depends off course on the interaction with other…

Any organism is embedded in an environment that changes over time. The timescale for and statistics of environmental change, the precision with which the organism can detect its environment, and the costs and benefits of particular protein…

Adaptive response to a varying environment is a common feature of biological organisms. Reproducing such features in electronic systems and circuits is of great importance for a variety of applications. Here, we consider memory models…

One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…

Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…

Adaptation to changing environments is a universal feature of life and can involve the organism modifying itself in response to the environment as well as actively modifying the environment to control selection pressures. The latter case…

In complex environments, there are costs to both ignorance and perception. An organism needs to track fitness-relevant information about its world, but the more information it tracks, the more resources it must devote to memory and…

The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…

When involution affects individuals, their efforts do not augment resources but merely compete for limited resources. From entrance exams to company overtime, such efforts lead to unnecessary costs, undermining group welfare. Meanwhile, the…

The formation of groups of interacting individuals improves performance and fitness in many decentralised systems, from micro-organisms to social insects, from robotic swarms to artificial intelligence algorithms. Often, group formation and…

We explore how different types and uses of memory can aid spatial navigation in changing uncertain environments. In the simple foraging task we study, every day, our agent has to find its way from its home, through barriers, to food.…

We conducted an investigation of the effect that extreme variability of the individual's environment has in the individual's adaptability and, in general, in the co-evolution of a population. First we assume that the individuals are a kind…

Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…

Cells maintain a stable size as they grow and divide. Inspired by the available experimental data, most proposed models for size homeostasis assume size control mechanisms that act on a timescale of one generation. Such mechanisms lead to…

We live in a time where climate models predict future increases in environmental variability and biological invasions are becoming increasingly frequent. A key to developing effective responses to biological invasions in increasingly…