Related papers: The prebiotic emergence of biological evolution
Predicting evolution of expanding populations is critical to control biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with examples of…
Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…
The central goal of a dynamical theory of evolution is to abstract the mean evolutionary trajectory in the trait space by considering ecological processes at the level of the individual. In this work, we develop such a theory for a new…
It has been hypothesized that in the era just before the last universal common ancestor emerged, life on earth was fundamentally collective. Ancient life forms shared their genetic material freely through massive horizontal gene transfer…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…
A fundamental problem in protobiological dynamics is to understand how chemically generated polymers can form persistent sequence distributions before the emergence of replication. We study deterministic polymer growth in which each finite…
The continuity of life and its evolution, we proposed, emerge from an interactive group process manifested in networks of interaction. We term this process \textit{survival-of-the-fitted}. Here, we reason that survival of the fitted results…
The growth, form, and division of prebiotic vesicles, membraneous bags of fluid of varying components and shapes is hypothesized to have served as the substrate for the origin of life. The dynamics of these out-of-equilibrium structures is…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
We study evolutionary processes induced by spatio-temporal dynamics in prebiotic evolution. Using numerical simulations we demonstrate that hypercycles emerge from complex interaction structures in multispecies systems. In this work we also…
Genetic variation in a population can sometimes arise so fast as to modify ecosystem dynamics. Such phenomena have been observed in natural predator-prey systems, and characterized in the laboratory as showing unusual phase relationships in…
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…
The apparent difficulty of designing simple autocatalysts that grow exponentially in the absence of enzymes, external drives or ingenious internal mechanisms severely constrains scenarios for the emergence of evolution by natural selection…
In models for the evolution of predation from initially purely competitive species interactions, the propensity of predation is most often assumed to be a direct consequence of the relative morphological and physiological traits of…
The origin of diversification and coexistence of genes and species have been traditionally studied in isolated biological levels. Ecological and evolutionary views have focused on the mechanisms that enable or constrain species coexistence,…
In a complex community, species continuously adapt to each other. On rare occasions, the adaptation of a species can lead to the extinction of others, and even its own. "Adaptive dynamics" is the standard mathematical framework to describe…
This chapter synthesizes evidence from cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychological studies, and computational models for a complex systems inspired theory of creativity, and its role in cultural evolution. Creativity…
Evolution produces complex and structured networks of interacting components in chemical, biological, and social systems. We describe a simple mathematical model for the evolution of an idealized chemical system to study how a network of…
Evolutionary transitions among ecological interactions are widely known, although their detailed dynamics remain absent for most population models. Adaptive dynamics has been used to illustrate how the parameters of population models might…