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Tree-grass coexistence is a defining feature of savanna ecosystems, which play an important role in supporting biodiversity and human populations worldwide. While recent advances have clarified many of the underlying processes, how these…
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…
Complex adaptive systems (CASs), from ecosystems to economies, are open systems and inherently dependent on external conditions. While a system can transition from one state to another based on the magnitude of change in external…
Stochastic chemical reaction or population dynamics in finite systems often terminates in an absorbing state. Yet in large spatially extended systems, the time to reach species extinction (or fixation) becomes exceedingly long. Tuning…
Ecological and evolutionary dynamics have been historically regarded as unfolding at broadly separated timescales. However, these two types of processes are nowadays well documented to much more tightly than traditionally assumed,…
We study an abstract model for the co-evolution between mutating viruses and the adaptive immune system. In sequence space, these two populations are localized around transiently dominant strains. Delocalization or error thresholds exhibit…
The theory of alternative stable states and tipping points has garnered substantial attention in the last several decades. It predicts potential critical transitions from one ecosystem state to a completely different state under increasing…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
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.…
Cell populations invade through a combination of proliferation and motility. Proliferation depends on the internal timing of cell division: how long cells take to complete the cell cycle. This timing varies substantially within (and across)…
We explore the connection between migration patterns and emergent behaviors of evolving populations in spatially heterogeneous environments. Despite extensive studies in ecologically and medically important systems, a unifying framework…
Population dynamics reflects an underlying birth-death process, where the rates associated with different events may depend on external environmental conditions and on the population density. A whole family of simple and popular…
The causes of major and rapid transitions observed in biological macroevolution as well as in the evolution of social systems are a subject of much debate. Here we identify the proximate causes of crashes and recoveries that arise…
We discuss tipping phenomena (critical transitions) in nonautonomous systems using an example of a bistable ecosystem model with environmental changes represented by time-varying parameters [Scheffer et al., Ecosystems, 11 (2008), pp.…
Model studies indicate that many climate subsystems, especially ecosystems, may be vulnerable to 'tipping': a 'catastrophic process' in which a system, driven by gradually changing external factors, abruptly transitions (or 'collapses')…
Consider a supercritical branching random walk in a time-inhomogeneous random environment. We impose a selection (called barrier) on survival in the following way. The position of the barrier may depend on the generation and the…
The drift-barrier hypothesis states that random genetic drift constrains the refinement of a phenotype under natural selection. The influence of effective population size and the genome-wide deleterious mutation rate were studied…
We study delay-induced transitions in consensus dynamics on signed networks with a ring topology. The proposed model is formulated as a system of delay differential equations incorporating both cooperative and antagonistic interactions, as…
Habitat loss, driven primarily by anthropogenic activity, significantly threatens ecosystem sustainability. While it is well understood that habitat loss is the leading contributor to declines in biodiversity worldwide, the connection…
Top-down causation has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems. Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down…