Related papers: Equilibrium and Competition in Evolutionary Dynami…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
Ecology and evolution are inherently linked, and studying a mathematical model that considers both holds promise of insightful discoveries related to the dynamics of cooperation. In the present article, we use the prisoner's dilemma (PD)…
Evolutionary game theory has impacted many fields of research by providing a mathematical framework for studying the evolution and maintenance of social and moral behaviors. This success is owed in large part to the demonstration that the…
Prion and prion-like molecules are a type of self replicating aggregate protein that have been implicated in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. Over recent decades the molecular dynamics of prions have been characterized both…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
At an early stage in pre-biotic evolution, groups of replicating molecules must coordinate their reproduction to form aggregated units of selection. Mechanisms that enable this to occur are currently not well understood. In this paper we…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
This paper is concerned with a mathematical model of competition for resource where species consume noninteracting resources. This system of differential equations is formally obtained by renormalizing the MacArthur's competition model at…
We study a simple solvable model describing the genesis of monomer sequences for hetero-polymers (such as proteins), as the result of the equilibration of a slow stochastic genetic selection process which is assumed to be driven by the…
A common assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing evolution of complexity appear more nuanced. Evolution is deeply connected to learning, where…
Selection in a time-periodic environment is modeled via the continuous-time two-player replicator dynamics, which for symmetric pay-offs reduces to the Fisher equation of mathematical genetics. For a sufficiently rapid and cyclic…
The fuel-driven process of replication in living systems generates distributions of copied entities with varying degrees of copying accuracy. Here we introduce a thermodynamically consistent ensemble for investigating universal population…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
We study a one-dimensional lattice of $N$ sites each occupied by a mathematical "polymer," that is, is a binary random sequence of arbitrary length $n$, or equivalently, a rooted path of $n$ links on an infinite binary tree. The average…
The finitely repeated Prisoners' Dilemma is a good illustration of the discrepancy between the strategic behaviour suggested by a game-theoretic analysis and the behaviour often observed among human players, where cooperation is maintained…
Due to the asymmetric nature of the nucleotides, the extant informational biomolecule, DNA, is constrained to replicate unidirectionally on a template. As a product of molecular evolution that sought to maximize replicative potential, DNA's…
In this paper, we deal with the equilibrium selection problem, which amounts to steering a population of individuals engaged in strategic game-theoretic interactions to a desired collective behavior. In the literature, this problem has been…
Macroevolutionary dynamics often display sudden, explosive surges, where systems remain relatively stable for extended periods before experiencing dramatic acceleration that frequently exceeds traditional exponential growth. This pattern is…
An explanatory model for the emergence of evolvable units must display emerging structures that (1) preserve themselves in time (2) self-reproduce and (3) tolerate a certain amount of variation when reproducing. To tackle this challenge,…