Related papers: Natural selection at multiple scales
When polygenic traits are under stabilizing selection, many different combinations of alleles allow close adaptation to the optimum. If alleles have equal effects, all combinations that result in the same deviation from the optimum are…
How does social complexity depend on population size and cultural transmission? Kinship structures in traditional societies provide a fundamental illustration, where cultural rules between clans determine people's marriage possibilities.…
High-dimensional datasets depict a challenge for learning tasks in data mining and machine learning. Feature selection is an effective technique in dealing with dimensionality reduction. It is often an essential data processing step prior…
What features characterise complex system dynamics? Power laws and scale invariance of fluctuations are often taken as the hallmarks of complexity, drawing on analogies with equilibrium critical phenomena[1-3]. Here we argue that slow,…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…
Geographic ranges of communities of species evolve in response to environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces. Understanding the effects of these forces on species' range dynamics is a major goal of spatial ecology. Previous…
Ecological selection is a major driver of community assembly. Selection is classified as stabilizing when species with intermediate trait values gain the highest reproductive success, whereas selection is considered directional when fitness…
Random walks on multidimensional nonlinear landscapes are of interest in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, properties of adaptive trajectories on fitness landscapes determine population fates and thus play a central role…
There are diverse mechanisms driving the evolution of social networks. A key open question dealing with understanding their evolution is: How various preferential linking mechanisms produce networks with different features? In this paper we…
Ecology studies biodiversity in its variety and complexity. It describes how species distribute and perform in response to environmental changes. Ecological processes and structures are highly complex and adaptive. In order to quantify…
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
For billions of years, evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life, including humans. Evolution endowed humans with high intelligence, which allowed us to become one of the most successful species on the planet.…
In complex systems, the interplay between nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, e.g., J. Monod's necessity and chance, gives rise to an evolutionary process in Darwinian sense, in terms of discrete jumps among attractors, with punctuated…
Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…
Competition between species and genotypes is a dominant factor in a variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Biological dynamics are typically highly stochastic, and therefore, analyzing a competitive system requires accounting for…
Beneficial reversals of dominance reduce the costs of genetic trade-offs and can enable selection to maintain genetic variation for fitness. Beneficial dominance reversals are characterized by the beneficial allele for a given context (e.g.…
While Neutral Theory famously describes the number of discrete genetic differences in populations, we consider the number of genetic backgrounds under which such differences are observed - setting limits to the generalizability of their…
The shape of allele-frequency clines maintained by migration-selection balance depends not only on the properties of migration and selection, but also on the dominance relations among alleles and on linkage to other loci under selection. We…
Systems as diverse as genetic networks or the world wide web are best described as networks with complex topology. A common property of many large networks is that the vertex connectivities follow a scale-free power-law distribution. This…
Interacting proteins coevolve at multiple but interconnected scales, from the residue-residue over the protein-protein up to the family-family level. The recent accumulation of enormous amounts of sequence data allows for the development of…