Related papers: Quantifying Hierarchical Selection
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
Higher-order networks have emerged as a powerful framework to model complex systems and their collective behavior. Going beyond pairwise interactions, they encode structured relations among arbitrary numbers of units through representations…
Understanding how the structure of community interactions is modified by coevolution is vital for understanding system responses to change at all scales. However, in absence of a group selection process, collective community behaviours…
Many real systems are strongly characterized by collective cooperative phenomena whose existence and properties still need a satisfactory explanation. Coherently with their collective nature, they call for new and more accurate descriptions…
Empirical complex systems can be characterized not only by pairwise interactions, but also by higher-order (group) interactions influencing collective phenomena, from metabolic reactions to epidemics. Nevertheless, higher-order networks'…
We study the Tangled Nature model of macro evolution and demonstrate that the co-evolutionary dynamics produces an increasingly correlated core of well occupied types. At the same time the entire configuration of types becomes increasing…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Problem-solving competence at group level is influenced by the structure of the social networks and so it may shed light on the organization patterns of gregarious animals. Here we use an agent-based model to investigate whether the…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
Several networks occurring in real life have modular structures that are arranged in an hierarchical fashion. In this paper, we have proposed a model for such networks, using a stochastic generation method. Using this model we show that,…
We study the statistics of ecosystems with a variable number of co-evolving species. The species interact in two ways: by prey-predator relationships and by direct competition with similar kinds. The interaction coefficients change slowly…
We study the effect of speciation, i.e. the introduction of new species through evolution into communities, in the setting of predator-prey systems. Predator-prey dynamics is classically well modeled by Lotka-Volterra equations, also when…
The problem of natural selection in dispersal-structured populations consisting of individuals characterized by different diffusion coefficients is studied. The competition between the organisms is taken into account through the assumption…
Many social and biological systems are characterized by enduring hierarchies, including those organized around prestige in academia, dominance in animal groups, and desirability in online dating. Despite their ubiquity, the general…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their internal…
A central feature of complex systems is the relevance and entanglement of different levels of description. For instance, the dynamics of ecosystems can be alternatively described in terms of large ecological processes and classes of…
Quantitative predictions about the processes that promote species coexistence are a subject of active research in ecology. In particular, competitive interactions are known to shape and maintain ecological communities, and situations where…
There has been a long debate on how new levels of organization have evolved. It might seem unlikely, as cooperation must prevail over competition. One well-studied example is the emergence of autocatalytic sets, which seem to be a…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…