Related papers: Co-evolution of replicators and their parasites
Cooperation is ubiquitous across all levels of biological systems ranging from microbial communities to human societies. It, however, seemingly contradicts the evolutionary theory, since cooperators are exploited by free-riders and thus are…
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…
We propose a generic model of eco-systems, with a {\it hierarchical} food web structure. In our computer simulations we let the eco-system evolve continuously for so long that that we can monitor extinctions as well as speciations over…
Bacteria and their bacteriophages are the most abundant, widespread and diverse groups of biological entities on the planet. In an attempt to understand how the interactions between bacteria, virulent phages and temperate phages might…
We study the adaptive dynamics of predator-prey systems modeled by a dynamical system in which the traits of predators and prey are allowed to evolve by small mutations. When only the prey are allowed to evolve, and the size of the…
In a previous study, we considered an information-theoretic model of code evolution. In it, agents obtain information about their (common) environment by the perception of messages of other agents, which is determined by an interaction…
We introduce a generalized version of the frog model to describe the invasion of a parasite population in a spatially structured immobile host population with host immunity on the integer line. Parasites move according to simple symmetric…
CRISPR is a newly discovered prokaryotic immune system. Bacteria and archaea with this system incorporate genetic material from invading viruses into their genomes, providing protection against future infection by similar viruses. The…
Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. To gain a fundamental understanding of resistance evolution, a combination of systematic experimental and theoretical approaches is required. Evolution experiments combined with…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
Simple growth mechanisms have been proposed to explain the emergence of seemingly universal network structures. The widely-studied model of preferential attachment assumes that new nodes are more likely to connect to highly connected nodes.…
Species sharing a prey or a predator species may go extinct due to exploitative or apparent competition. We examine whether evolution of the shared species acts as a coexistence mechanism and to what extent the answer depends on the genetic…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
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…
As part of a generalized "prisoners' dilemma", is considered that the evolution of a population with a full set of behavioral strategies limited only by the depth of memory. Each subsequent generation of the population successively loses…
We simulate an individual-based model that represents both the phenotype and genome of digital organisms with predator-prey interactions. We show how open-ended growth of complexity arises from the invariance of genetic evolution operators…
In this paper we study invasion probabilities and invasion times of cooperative parasites spreading in spatially structured host populations. The spatial structure of the host population is given by a random geometric graph on $[0,1]^n$,…
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions…
Pathogens drive changes in host immune systems that in turn exert pressure for pathogens to evolve. Quantifying and understanding this constant coevolutionary process has clear practical global health implications. Yet its relatively easier…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…