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It has been suggested that innovations occur mainly by combination: the more inventions accumulate, the higher the probability that new inventions are obtained from previous designs. Additionally, it has been conjectured that the…
Mathematical models play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of biological experiments. Studies often present a model that generates the observations, connecting hypothesized process to an observed pattern. Such generative…
In the context of multistability driven diseases, like cancer, spatiotemporal plasticity plays a significant role to achieve a spectrum of phenotypic variations. The interplay between gene regulatory networks and environmental factors, such…
The well-defined but intricate course of time evolution exhibited by many naturally occurring phenomena suggests some source of dynamic order sustaining it. In spite of its obviousness as a problem, it has remained absent from the…
Understanding the statistical dynamics of growth and inequality is a fundamental challenge to ecology and society. Recent analyses of wealth and income dynamics in contemporary societies show that economic inequality is very dynamic and…
We study the long-time behaviour of phenotype-structured models describing the evolutionary dynamics of asexual species whose phenotypic fitness landscape is characterised by multiple peaks. First we consider the case where phenotypic…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
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…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
In microbial communities, each species often has multiple, distinct phenotypes, but studies of ecological stability have largely ignored this subpopulation structure. Here, we show that such implicit averaging over phenotypes leads to…
A probability model exhibits instability if small changes in a data outcome result in large, and often unanticipated, changes in probability. This instability is a property of the probability model, given by a distributional form and a…
Ecological and evolutionary processes show various population dynamics depending on internal interactions and environmental changes. While crucial in predicting biological processes, discovering general relations for such nonlinear dynamics…
While Neutral Theory famously describes the number of discrete genetic differences in populations, we consider the number of genetic backgrounds under which such differences are observed - setting limits to the generalizability of their…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
In unicellular organisms such as bacteria and in most viruses, mutations mainly occur during reproduction. Thus, genotypes with a high birth rate should have a higher mutation rate. However, standard models of asexual adaptation such as the…
In apparent contradiction to competition theory, the number of known, co-existing plankton species far exceeds their explicable biodiversity - a discrepancy termed the Paradox of the Plankton. We introduce a new game-theoretic model for…
The mutation-selection mechanism of Darwinian evolution gives rise not only to adaptation to environmental conditions but also to the enhancement of robustness against mutations. When two or more phenotypes have the same fitness value, the…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
Why, contrary to theoretical predictions, do marine microbe communities harbor tremendous phenotypic heterogeneity? How can so many marine microbe species competing in the same niche coexist? We discovered a unifying explanation for both…
Prevalence of cooperation within groups of selfish individuals is puzzling in that it contradicts with the basic premise of natural selection. Favoring players with higher fitness, the latter is key for understanding the challenges faced by…