Related papers: Quantifying Hierarchical Selection
We consider the effects of social learning on the individual learning and genetic evolution of a colony of artificial agents capable of genetic, individual and social modes of adaptation. We confirm that there is strong selection pressure…
We argue that the stochastic dynamics of interacting agents which replicate, mutate and die constitutes a non-equilibrium physical process akin to aging in complex materials. Specifically, our study uses extensive computer simulations of…
The mutual influence of dynamics and structure is a central issue in complex systems. In this paper we study by simulation slow evolution of network under the feedback of a local-majority-rule opinion process. If performance-enhancing local…
Recent studies have shown that novel collective behaviors emerge in complex systems due to the presence of higher-order interactions. However, how the collective behavior of a system is influenced by the microscopic organization of its…
Identifying undocumented or potential future interactions among species is a challenge facing modern ecologists. Recent link prediction methods rely on trait data, however large species interaction databases are typically sparse and…
Collective action and group formation are fundamental behaviors among both organisms cooperating to maximize their fitness, and people forming socioeconomic organizations. Researchers have extensively explored social interaction structures…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
Interactions among living organisms, from bacteria colonies to human societies, are inherently more complex than interactions among particles and nonliving matter. Group interactions are a particularly important and widespread class,…
This paper combines the idea of a hierarchical distributed genetic algorithm with different inter-agent partnering strategies. Cascading clusters of sub-populations are built from bottom up, with higher-level sub-populations optimising…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
We consider the concept of mutual information in ecological networks, and use this idea to analyse the Tangled Nature model of co-evolution. We show that this measure of correlation has two distinct behaviours depending on how we define the…
For years, a main focus of ecological research has been to better understand the complex dynamical interactions between species which comprise food webs. Using the connectance properties of a widely explored synthetic food web called the…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
We introduce a model, based on the Evolutionary Game Theory, for studying the dynamics of group formation. The latter constitutes a relevant phenomenon observed in different animal species, whose individuals tend to cluster together forming…
Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…
Imitation is a basic updating mechanism for strategy evolution in structured populations, determining how individuals sample social information and translate it into behavioral changes. Higher-order networks, such as hypergraphs, generalize…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…