Related papers: Can a rudderless species survive?
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
We study two models of population with migration. We assume that we are given infinitely many islands with the same number r of resources, each individual consuming one unit of resources. On an island lives an individual whose genealogy is…
The theory of lithopanspermia proposes the natural exchange of organisms between solar system bodies through meteorites. The focus of this theory comprises three distinct stages: planetary ejection, interplanetary transit and planetary…
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…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
Civilization cannot sustain an exponential growth for long time even when neglecting numerous laws of physics! In this paper, we examine what are fundamental obstacles to long term survival of a civilization and its possibility to colonize…
Several groups have recently suggested that small planets orbiting very closely around white dwarf stars could be promising locations for life to arise, even after stellar death. There are still many uncertainties, however, regarding the…
Salamanders (urodela) have among the largest vertebrate genomes, ranging in size from 10 to over 80 pg. The urodela are divided into ten extant families each with a characteristic range in genome size. Although changes in genome size often…
Zooplankton in a quiescent environment can detect predators by hydrodynamic sensing, triggering powerful escape responses. Since turbulent strain tends to mask the hydrodynamic signal, the organisms should avoid such regions, but it is not…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Exploration and trapping properties of random walkers that may evanesce at any time as they walk have seen very little treatment in the literature, and yet a finite lifetime is a frequent occurrence, and its effects on a number of random…
Most Tidal Dwarf Galaxies (TDGs) so-far discussed in the literature may be considered as young ones or even newborns, as they are still physically linked to their parent galaxies by an umbilical cord: the tidal tail at the tip of which they…
In apparent contradiction to competition theory, the number of known, co-existing plankton species far exceeds their explicable biodiversity - a discrepancy termed the Paradox of the Plankton. We introduce a new game-theoretic model for…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
Undulatory locomotion is a means of self-propulsion that relies on the generation and propagation of waves along a body. As a mode of locomotion it is primitive and relatively simple, yet can be remarkably robust. No wonder then, that it is…
This review paper presents the known results on the asymptotics of the survival probability and limit theorems conditioned on survival of critical and subcritical branching processes in IID random environments. The key assumptions of the…
In an attempt to explain the uniqueness of the coding mechanism of living cells as contrasted with multi-species structure of ecosystems we examine two models of individuals with some replicative properties. In the first model the system…
In a multiverse context, determining the probability of being in our particular universe depends on estimating its overall habitability compared to other universes with different values of the fundamental constants. One of the most…
Source-sink systems are metapopulations of patches that can be of variable habitat quality. They can be seen as graphs, where vertices represent the patches, and the weighted oriented edges give the probability of dispersal from one patch…
We investigate the origin and stability of extrasolar satellites orbiting close-in gas giants, focusing on whether these satellites can survive planetary migration within a protoplanetary disk. To address this question, we used Posidonius,…