Related papers: Coexistence vs collapse in transposon populations
Many species live in colonies that thrive for a while and then collapse. Upon collapse very few individuals survive. The survivors start new colonies at other sites that thrive until they collapse, and so on. We introduce spatial and…
Transposable elements, or transposons, are DNA sequences that can jump from site to site in the genome during the life cycle of a cell, usually encoding the very enzymes which perform their excision. However, some transposons are parasitic,…
A variety of genome transformations can occur as a microbial population adapts to a large environmental change. In particular, genomic surveys indicate that, following the transition to an obligate, host-dependent symbiont, the density of…
Many species live in colonies that prosper for a while and then collapse. After the collapse the colony survivors disperse randomly and found new colonies that may or may not make it depending on the new environment they find. We use birth…
Ecosystems can undergo sudden shifts to undesirable states, but recent studies with simple single species ecosystems have demonstrated that advance warning can be provided by the slowing down of population dynamics near a tipping point.…
Can prelife proceed without cell division? A recently proposed mechanism suggests that transient compartmentalization could have preceded cell division in prebiotic scenarios. Here, we study transient compartmentalization dynamics in the…
We discuss a simple model of co-evolution. In order to emphasise the effect of interaction between individuals the entire population is subjected to the same physical environment. Species are emergent structures and extinction, origination…
Speciation is fundamental to the huge diversity of life on Earth. Evidence suggests reproductive isolation arises most commonly in allopatry with a higher speciation rate in small populations. Current theory does not address this dependence…
When three species compete cyclically in a well-mixed, stochastic system of $N$ individuals, extinction is known to typically occur at times scaling as the system size $N$. This happens, for example, in rock-paper-scissors games or…
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…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
Frequency-dependent selection reflects the interaction between different species as they battle for limited resources in their environment. In a stochastic evolutionary game the species relative fitnesses guides the evolutionary dynamics…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
We consider a stochastic model for an evolving population. We show that in the presence of genotype extinctions the population dies out for a low mutation probability but may survive for a high mutation probability. This turns upside down…
We present a theoretical as well as experimental investigation of a population of self-replicating segments of code subject to random mutation and survival of the fittest. Under the assumption that such a system constitutes a minimal system…
We are interested in modeling some two-level population dynamics, resulting from the interplay of ecological interactions and phenotypic variation of individuals (or hosts) and the evolution of cells (or parasites) of two types living in…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
Individuals within any species exhibit differences in size, developmental state, or spatial location. These differences coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates can have subtle effects on population persistence and…
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…
Vegetation patterns are a ubiquitous feature of water-deprived ecosystems. Despite the competition for the same limiting resource, coexistence of several plant species is commonly observed. We propose a two-species reaction-diffusion model…