Related papers: On the possibility of engineering social evolution…
Cooperation is a difficult proposition in the face of Darwinian selection. Those that defect have an evolutionary advantage over cooperators who should therefore die out. However, spatial structure enables cooperators to survive through the…
Levels of sociality in nature vary widely. Some species are solitary; others live in family groups; some form complex multi-family societies. Increased levels of social interaction can allow for the spread of useful innovations and…
Decision-making societies may vary in their level of cooperation and degree of conservatism, both of which influence their overall performance. Moreover, these factors are not fixed -- they can change based on the decisions agents in the…
We investigate the evolutionary rescue of a microbial population in a gradually deteriorating environment, through a combination of analytical calculations and stochastic simulations. We consider a population destined for extinction in the…
The interdependence between an individual strategy decision and the resulting change of environmental state is often a subtle process. Feedback-evolving games have been a prevalent framework for studying such feedback in well-mixed…
Social structure affects the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. Here we study the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in fragmented societies, and show that conjoining segregated cooperation-inhibiting groups, if done properly,…
Understanding if and how mutants reach fixation in populations is an important question in evolutionary biology. We study the impact of population growth has on the success of mutants. To systematically understand the effects of growth we…
Fluctuating environments are situations where the spatio-temporal stochasticity plays a significant role in the evolutionary dynamics. The study of the evolution of cooperation in these environments typically assumes a homogeneous, well…
Human societies are organized and developed through collective cooperative behaviors, in which interactions between individuals are governed by the underlying social connections. It is well known that, based on the information in their…
We present a two-species population model in a well-mixed environment where the dynamics involves, in addition to birth and death, changes due to environmental factors and inter-species interactions. The novel dynamical components are…
A great number of biological organisms live in aqueous environments. Major evolutionary transitions, including the emergence of life itself, likely occurred in such environments. While the chemical aspects of the role of water in biology…
We propose an approach of open-ended evolution via the simulation of swarm dynamics. In nature, swarms possess remarkable properties, which allow many organisms, from swarming bacteria to ants and flocking birds, to form higher-order…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…
We investigate the effect of cooperative interactions in an ensemble of microorganisms, modelled as self-propelled disk-like and rod-like particles, in a three-dimensional turbulent flow to show flocking as an emergent phenomenon. Building…
We propose a variation of the standard genetic algorithm that incorporates social interaction between the individuals in the population. Our goal is to understand the evolutionary role of social systems and its possible application as a…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
Many complex adaptive systems contain a large diversity of specialized components. The specialization at the level of the microscopic degrees of freedom, and diversity at the level of the system as a whole are phenomena that appear during…
Organisms from microbes to humans engage in a variety of social behaviors, which affect fitness in complex, often nonlinear ways. The question of how these behaviors evolve has consequences ranging from antibiotic resistance to human…
Environmental heterogeneity can drive genetic heterogeneity in expanding populations; mutant strains may emerge that trade overall growth rate for an improved ability to survive in patches that are hostile to the wild type. This…
The functioning of animal as well as human societies fundamentally relies on cooperation. Yet, defection is often favorable for the selfish individual, and social dilemmas arise. Selection by individuals' fitness, usually the basic driving…