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To learn about the past from a sample of genomic sequences, one needs to understand how evolutionary processes shape genetic diversity. Most population genetic inference is based on frameworks assuming adaptive evolution is rare. But if…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
Many important challenges in science and technology can be cast as optimization problems. When viewed in a statistical physics framework, these can be tackled by simulated annealing, where a gradual cooling procedure helps search for…
Population annealing is a sequential Monte Carlo scheme well-suited to simulating equilibrium states of systems with rough free energy landscapes. Here we use population annealing to study a binary mixture of hard spheres. Population…
Variability on external conditions has important consequences for the dynamics and the organization of biological systems. In many cases, the characteristic timescale of environmental changes as well as their correlations play a fundamental…
We consider a system of two competing populations in two-dimensional heterogeneous environments. The populations are assumed to move horizontally and vertically with different probabilities, but are otherwise identical. We regard these…
The search ability of an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) depends on the variation among the individuals in the population [3, 4, 8]. Maintaining an optimal level of diversity in the EA population is imperative to ensure that progress of the EA…
Strong positive feedback is considered a necessary condition to observe abrupt shifts of ecosystems. A few previous studies have shown that demographic noise -- arising from the probabilistic and discrete nature of birth and death processes…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
The impact of environmental variability on population size growth rate in dynamic models is a recurrent issue in the theoretical ecology literature. In the scalar case, R. Lande pointed out that results are ambiguous depending on whether…
Models of population growth and extinction are an increasingly popular subject of study. However, consequences of stochasticity and noise in shaping distributions and outcomes are not sufficiently explored. Here we consider a distributed…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
Heterogeneities in environmental conditions often induce corresponding heterogeneities in the distribution of species. In the extreme case of a localized patch of increased growth rates, reproducing populations can become strongly…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
The learning dynamics of biological brains and artificial neural networks are of interest to both neuroscience and machine learning. A key difference between them is that neural networks are often trained from a randomly initialized state…
Biological populations are subject to two types of noise: demographic stochasticity due to fluctuations in the reproductive success of individuals, and environmental variations that affect coherently the relative fitness of entire…
Large sets of genotypes give rise to the same phenotype because phenotypic expression is highly redundant. Accordingly, a population can accept mutations without altering its phenotype, as long as thegenotype mutates into another one on the…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
The rate of adoption of new information depends on reinforcement from multiple sources in a way that often cannot be described by simple contagion processes. In such cases, contagion is said to be complex. Complex contagion happens in the…
In many statistical problems, a more coarse-grained model may be suitable for population-level behaviour, whereas a more detailed model is appropriate for accurate modelling of individual behaviour. This raises the question of how to…