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Swarming behaviors in animals have been extensively studied due to their implications for the evolution of cooperation, social cognition, and predator-prey dynamics. An important goal of these studies is discerning which evolutionary…
The protein folding problem has attracted an increasing attention from physicists. The problem has a flavor of statistical mechanics, but possesses the most common feature of most biological problems -- the profound effects of evolution. I…
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…
Biological functions are typically performed by groups of cells that express predominantly the same genes, yet display a continuum of phenotypes. While it is known how one genotype can generate such non-genetic diversity, it remains unclear…
Results of experimental investigation are presented of evolutionary dynamics of several stochastic pattern formation and growth models designed by modifications of the famous mathematical Game of Life. The modifications are two-fold: Game…
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
We introduce and analyse an individual-based evolutionary model, in which a population of genetically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources. Through theoretical analysis and stochastic simulations, we show that the…
How do the same mechanisms that faithfully regenerate complex developmental programs in spite of environmental and genetic perturbations also permit responsiveness to environmental signals, adaptation, and genetic evolution? Using the…
Innovation is a key ingredient for the evolution of several systems, including social and biological ones. Focused investigations and lateral thinking may lead to innovation, as well as serendipity and other random discovery processes. Some…
Evolutionary game theory has traditionally employed deterministic models to describe population dynamics. These models, due to their inherent nonlinearities, can exhibit deterministic chaos, where population fluctuations follow complex,…
The problem of the directionality of genome evolution is studied from the information-theoretic view. We propose that the function-coding information quantity of a genome always grows in the course of evolution through sequence duplication,…
The exploration of vast genotype spaces poses fundamental challenges for evolving populations. As the number of genotypes encoding viable phenotypes grows exponentially with genome length, populations can only explore a tiny fraction of…
Conventional deep learning prioritizes unconstrained optimization, yet biological systems operate under strict metabolic constraints. We propose that these physical constraints shape dynamics to function not as limitations, but as a…
The evolutionary dynamics of molecular populations are strongly dependent on the structure of genotype spaces. The map between genotype and phenotype determines how easily genotype spaces can be navigated and the accessibility of…
In ecology and population dynamics, gene-flow refers to the transfer of a trait from one population to another. This phenomenon appears in studying the evolution of social features, such as languages. From the mathematical point of view,…
Competition between individuals drives the evolution of whole species. Although the fittest individuals survive the longest and produce the most offspring, in some circumstances the resulting species may not be optimally fit. Here, using…
Evolution is a dynamic process. The two classical forces of evolution are mutation and selection. Assuming small mutation rates, evolution can be predicted based solely on the fitness differences between phenotypes. Predicting an…
Biological systems are modular, and this modularity evolves over time and in different environments. A number of observations have been made of increased modularity in biological systems under increased environmental pressure. We here…
Previous evolutionary studies demonstrated how evaluating evolving agents in variable environmental conditions enable them to develop solutions that are robust to environmental variation. We demonstrate how the robustness of the agents can…
It is argued that in the case of a smooth transition across a (dilaton-driven) curvature bounce the growing mode of the vector fluctuations matches continuously with a decaying mode at later times. Analytical examples of this observation…