Related papers: Co-evolution of replicators and their parasites
Why are living systems complex? Why does the biosphere contain living beings with complexity features beyond those of the simplest replicators? What kind of evolutionary pressures result in more complex life forms? These are key questions…
Technological parasitism is a new theory to explain the evolution of technology in society. In this context, this study proposes a model to analyze the interaction between a host technology (system) and a parasitic technology (subsystem) to…
We consider a discrete-time host-parasite model for a population of cells which are colonized by proliferating parasites. The cell population grows like an ordinary Galton-Watson process, but in reflection of real biological settings the…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
To examine the co-evolution of quantitative traits in hosts and parasites, we present and study a co-evolutionary model of a social parasite-host system that incorporates (1) ecological dynamics that feed back into their co-evolutionary…
Can prelife proceed without cell division? A recently proposed mechanism suggests that transient compartmentalization could have preceded cell division in prebiotic scenarios. Here, we study transient compartmentalization dynamics in the…
Patterns of nestedness and specialization asymmetry, where specialist species interact mainly with generalists while generalists interact with both generalists and specialists, are often observed in mutualistic and antagonistic bi-partite…
Certain defense mechanisms of phages against the immune system of their bacterial host rely on cooperation of phages. Motivated by this example we analyse invasion probabilities of cooperative parasites in host populations that are…
Males are often the "sicker" sex with male biased parasitism found in a taxonomically diverse range of species. There is considerable interest in the processes that could underlie the evolution of sex-biased parasitism. Mating system…
Spatial patterning can be crucially important for understanding the behavior of interacting populations. Here we investigate a simple model of parasite and host populations in which parasites are random walkers that must come into contact…
Traditionally, studies of coevolving systems have considered cases where a parasite may inhabit only a single host. The case where a parasite may infect many hosts, widespread parasitism, has until recently gained little traction. This is…
Predator prey interactions are one of ecology's central research themes, but with many interdisciplinary implications across the social and natural sciences. Here we consider an often-overlooked species in these interactions, namely…
One strategy for winning a coevolutionary struggle is to evolve rapidly. Most of the literature on host-pathogen coevolution focuses on this phenomenon, and looks for consequent evidence of coevolutionary arms races. An alternative…
Multipartite viruses replicate through a puzzling evolutionary strategy. Their genome is segmented into two or more parts, and encapsidated in separate particles that appear to propagate independently. Completing the replication cycle,…
The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…
Cooperation and competition between pathogens can alter the amount of individuals affected by a co-infection. Nonetheless, the evolution of the pathogens' behavior has been overlooked. Here, we consider a co-evolutionary model where the…
Understanding the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and is frequently studied by the framework of evolutionary game theory. A very powerful mechanism to promote cooperation is…
While modern physics and biology satisfactorily explain the passage from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth and the first cells to present-day life, respectively, the origins of biochemical life still remain an open question. Since…
Transient compartments have been recently shown to be able to maintain functional replicators in the context of prebiotic studies. Motivated by this experiment, we show that a broad class of selection dynamics is able to achieve this goal.…
Camouflage in nature seems to arise from competition between predator and prey. To survive, predators must find prey, and prey must avoid being found. This work simulates an abstract model of that adversarial relationship. It looks at…