Related papers: Self-organized criticality, evolution and the foss…
Power laws and distributions with heavy tails are common features of many experimentally studied complex systems, like the distribution of the sizes of earthquakes and solar flares, or the duration of neuronal avalanches in the brain.…
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,…
The extinction of species is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. One way of investigating the causes and consequences of extinctions is to build conceptual ecological models, and to use the dynamical outcomes of such…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
In a complex community, species continuously adapt to each other. On rare occasions, the adaptation of a species can lead to the extinction of others, and even its own. "Adaptive dynamics" is the standard mathematical framework to describe…
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…
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…
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 study a model of a multi-species ecosystem described by Lotka-Volterra-like equations. Interactions among species form a network whose evolution is determined by the dynamics of the model. Numerical simulations show power-law…
We analyze the influence of long-range correlated (colored) external noise on extinction phase transitions in growth and spreading processes. Uncorrelated environmental noise (i.e., temporal disorder) was recently shown to give rise to an…
Species extinction occurs regularly and unavoidably in ecological systems. The time scales for extinction can broadly vary and inform on the ecosystem's stability. We study the spatio-temporal extinction dynamics of a paradigmatic…
We suggest that ensembles of self-replicating entities such as biological systems naturally evolve into a self-organized critical state in which fluctuations, as well as waiting-times between phase transitions are distributed according to a…
We investigate correlation time numerically in extremal self-organized critical models, namely, the Bak-Sneppen evolution and the Robin Hood dynamics. The (fitness) correlation time is the duration required for the extinction or mutation of…
Extinction appears ubiquitously in many fields, including chemical reactions, population biology, evolution, and epidemiology. Even though extinction as a random process is a rare event, its occurrence is observed in large finite…
Self-organized criticality is characterized by power law correlations in the non-equilibrium steady state of externally driven systems. A dynamical system proposed here self-organizes itself to a critical state with no characteristic size…
Many natural or human-made systems encompassing local reactions and diffusion processes exhibit spatially distributed patterns of some relevant dynamical variable. These interactions, through self-organization and critical phenomena, give…
The origin of power-law distributions in self-organized criticality is investigated by treating the variation of the number of active sites in the system as a stochastic process. An avalanche is then regarded as a first-return random walk…
We propose a model for evolution aiming to reproduce statistical features of fossil data, in particular the distributions of extinction events, the distribution of species per genus and the distribution of lifetimes, all of which are known…
Species extinction is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. Competition between species in a population is considered by ecological niche-based theories as a key factor leading to different severity of species…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…