Related papers: Can a rudderless species survive?
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented, and their survival far beyond reproductive age may be a byproduct rather than tool of evolution. Physical approach, which takes…
Cosmological models have granted dwarf galaxies a key role: their properties constrain the distribution of dark matter and the physical evolution of their hosts. There is increasing evidence that objects with masses of dwarf galaxies form…
Sperm cells perform extremely demanding tasks with minimal capabilities. The cells must quickly navigate in a noisy environment to find an egg within a short time window for successful fertilization without any global positioning…
Although geographic isolation has been shown to play a key role in promoting reproductive isolation, it is now believed that speciation can also happen in sympatry and with considerable gene flow. Here we present a model of sympatric…
In this paper we afford a quantitative analysis of the sustainability of current world population growth in relation to the parallel deforestation process adopting a statistical point of view. We consider a simplified model based on a…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
We estimate the relative likelihood of success in the searches for primitive versus intelligent life on other planets. Taking into account the larger search volume for detectable artificial electromagnetic signals, we conclude that both…
The spatial dispersal of individuals is known to play an important role in the dynamics of populations, and is central to metapopulation theory. At the same time, local adaptation to environmental conditions creates a geographic mosaic of…
We formulated tidal decay lifetimes for hypothetical moons orbiting extrasolar planets with both lunar and stellar tides. Previous work neglected the effect of lunar tides on planet rotation, and are therefore applicable only to systems in…
We consider a stochastic model for species evolution. A new species is born at rate lambda and a species dies at rate mu. A random number, sampled from a given distribution F, is associated with each new species at the time of birth. Every…
We study the fate of a forager who searches for food performing a random walk on lattices. The forager consumes the available food on the site it visits and leaves it depleted but can survive up to $S$ steps without food. We introduce the…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering…
This article is concerned with a version of the contact process with sexual reproduction on a graph with two levels of interactions modeling metapopulations. The population is spatially distributed into patches and offspring are produced in…
The migratory abilities of motile human spermatozoa in vivo are essential for natural fertility, but it remains a mystery what properties distinguish the tens of cells which find an egg from the millions of cells ejaculated. To reach the…
Linyphiid spiders have evolved the ability to disperse long distances by a process known as ballooning. It has been hypothesized that ballooning may allow populations to persist in the highly disturbed agricultural areas that the spiders…
We consider the model of spatially distributed population consisting of two species with "\textsl{predator\,--\,prey}" interaction; each of the species occupies two stations. Transfer of individuals between the stations (migration) is not…
In this work of speculative science, scientists from a distant star system explain the emergence and consequences of triparentalism, when three individuals are required for sexual reproduction, which is the standard form of mating on their…
In this paper, we provide a sufficient condition on successful invasion by the predator. Specially, we obtain the persistence of traveling wave solutions of predator-prey system, in which the predator can survive without the predation of…
We consider the open stadium billiard, consisting of two semicircles joined by parallel straight sides with one hole situated somewhere on one of the sides. Due to the hyperbolic nature of the stadium billiard, the initial decay of…