Related papers: What doesn't kill Gaia makes her stronger
The search for biosignatures necessitates developing our understanding of life under different conditions. If life can influence the climate evolution of its planet then understanding the behaviour of life-climate feedbacks under extreme…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Earth is the only planet known to harbor life and, as a result, the search for habitable and inhabited planets beyond the Solar System commonly focuses on analogs to our planet. However, Earth's atmosphere and surface environment have…
We have developed a mathematical model that captures stress-induced mutagenesis, a fundamental aspect of pathogenic and neoplastic evolutionary dynamics, on the fitness landscape with multiple relevant genetic traits as a high-dimensional…
We present numerical results based on a simplified ecological system in evolution, showing features of extinction similar to that claimed for the biosystem on Earth. In the model each species consists of a population in interaction with the…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
The ability of a planet to maintain surface water, key to life as we know it, depends on solar and planetary energy. As a star ages, it delivers more energy to a planet. As a planet ages it produces less internal heat, which leads to…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
The effect of disturbance on a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually competitive species [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 188101 (2011); Mitarai et al. Phys. Rev. E 86, 011929 (2012) ] is studied. The disturbance stochastically…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…
This article reviews the emerging field of exo-geoscience, focusing on the geological and geophysical processes thought to influence the evolution and (eu)habitability of rocky exoplanets. We examine the possible roles of planetary…
It is generally recognized that a distinguishing feature of life is its peculiar capability to avoid equilibration. The origin of this capability and its evolution along the timeline of abiogenesis is not yet understood. We propose to study…
Motivated by the climate crisis that is currently ravaging the planet, we propose and analyze a novel framework for the evolution of anthropogenic climate impact in which the evolution of human environmental behavior and environmental…
Anthropogenic activity threatens biodiversity through climate change, habitat fragmentation, and increasing frequency and scale of disturbance. Various theoretical studies have sought to shed light on how these factors could promote or…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…
We introduce a model of biological evolution where species evolve in response to biotic interactions and a fluctuating environmental stress. The species may either become extinct or mutate to acquire a new fitness value when the effective…
In a recent study (Garrett, 2011), I described theoretical arguments and empirical evidence showing how civilization evolution might be considered from a purely physical basis. One implication is that civilization exhibits the property of…
A new delay equation is introduced to describe the punctuated evolution of complex nonlinear systems. A detailed analytical and numerical investigation provides the classification of all possible types of solutions for the dynamics of a…