Related papers: Disease from opposing forces in regulatory control

The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…

Human and artificial organizations may be described as networks of interacting parts. Those parts exchange data and control information and, as a result of these interactions, organizations produce emergent behaviors and purposes -- traits…

Controlling a dynamical system is the ability of changing its configuration arbitrarily through a suitable choice of inputs. It is a very well studied concept in control theory, with wide ranging applications in medicine, biology, social…

Emotional disorders and psychological flourishing are the result of complex interactions between positive and negative affects that depend on external events and the subject's internal representations. Based on psychological data, we…

The behaviour of individuals is a main actor in the control of the spread of a communicable disease and, in turn, the spread of an infectious disease can trigger behavioural changes in a population. Here, we study the emergence of the…

Mental stress is a vague though familiar concept that accounts for an agency of the good, the bad and the ugly, that operates in the brains of animated beings, in response to environmental stressors. In this work, we provide evidence for…

Human diseases spread over networks of contacts between individuals and a substantial body of recent research has focused on the dynamics of the spreading process. Here we examine a model of two competing diseases spreading over the same…

Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…

Mutation-induced drug resistance in cancer often causes the failure of therapies and cancer recurrence, despite an initial tumor reduction. The timing of such cancer recurrence is governed by a balance between several factors such as…

This paper analyses how risk-taking behaviour and preferences over consumption rank can emerge as a neutrally stable equilibrium when individuals face an anti-coordination task. If in an otherwise homogeneous society information about…

We use evolutionary game theory to examine how conflict-averse centrism can facilitate authoritarian success in polarized political conflicts. Such conflicts are often asymmetric: authoritarian actors can employ norm-breaking or coercive…

This paper suggests that aging is influenced synthetically by pro-aging factors such as ROS and anti-aging factors such as protective responses. The anti-aging effect may be side effects of retrograde responses motivated against adverse…

The emergence of mutant lineages within a viral species has become a public health problem, as the existing treatments and drugs are usually more effective on the original lineages than in the mutant ones. The following manuscript presents…

Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…

Many complex systems exhibit extreme events far more often than expected for a normal distribution. This work examines how self-similar bursts of activity across several orders of magnitude can emerge from first principles in systems that…

We consider a population of agents competing for finite resources using strategies based on two channels of signals. The model is applicable to financial markets, ecosystems and computer networks. We find that the dynamics of the system is…

When people receive new information, sometimes they revise their beliefs too much, and sometimes too little. In this paper, we show that a key driver of whether people overinfer or underinfer is the strength of the information. Based on a…

Biological systems perform an astonishing array of dynamical processes -- including development and repair, regulation, behavior and motor control, sensing and signaling, and adaptation, among others. Powered by the transduction of stored…

The contradiction between physical and economical sciences concerning the growth of the production/consumption mechanism is analyzed. It is then shown that if one wishes to keep the security level stable or to enhance it in a growing…

Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. To gain a fundamental understanding of resistance evolution, a combination of systematic experimental and theoretical approaches is required. Evolution experiments combined with…