Related papers: Self-organized criticality, evolution and the foss…
The fitness of a biological strategy is typically measured by its expected reproductive rate, the first moment of its offspring distribution. However, strategies with high expected rates can also have high probabilities of extinction. A…
We use a classical combinatorial inequality to establish a Markov inequality for multivariate binary Markov processes on trees. We then apply this result, alongside with the FKG inequality, to compare the expected loss of biodiversity under…
We study the ABC model (A + B --> 2B, B + C --> 2C, C + A --> 2A), and its counterpart: the three--component neutral drift model (A + B --> 2A or 2B, B + C --> 2B or 2C, C + A --> 2C or 2A.) In the former case, the mean field approximation…
We construct a model of speciation from evolution in an ecosystem consisting of a limited amount of energy recources. The species posses genetic information, which is inherited according to the rules of the Penna model of genetic evolution.…
Fire is an indissoluble component of ecosystems, however quantifying the effects of fire on vegetation is challenging task as fire lies outside the typical experimental design attributes. A recent simulation study showed that under…
The question we address here is of whether phenomena of collective bankruptcies are related to self-organized criticality. In order to answer it we propose a simple model of banking networks based on the random directed percolation. We…
The origin of self-organized criticality in a model without conservation law (Olami, Feder, and Christensen, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 68}, 1244 (1992)) is studied. The homogeneous system with periodic boundary condition is found to be periodic…
Theoretical ecology has traditionally equated persistence with the stability of a fixed equilibrium point. Here we argue that the primary threat to ecosystem persistence need not be the loss of stability, but instead the escape of the…
Recently (arXiv:0910.2870), we have derived a fluctuation theorem for systems in thermodynamic equilibrium compatible with anomalous response functions, e.g. the existence of states with \textit{negative heat capacities} $C<0$. In this…
The train model which is a variant of the Burridge-Knopoff earthquake model is investigated for a velocity-strengthening friction law. It shows self-organized criticality with complex scaling exponents. That is, the probability density…
The role of the selection pressure and mutation amplitude on the behavior of a single-species population evolving on a two-dimensional lattice, in a periodically changing environment, is studied both analytically and numerically. The…
The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…
According to the criticality hypothesis, collective biological systems should operate in a special parameter region, close to so-called critical points, where the collective behavior undergoes a qualitative change between different…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking plays a fundamental role in many areas of condensed matter and particle physics. A fundamental problem in ecology is the elucidation of the mechanisms responsible for biodiversity and stability. Neutral theory,…
We consider a critical bisexual branching process in a random environment generated by independent and identically distributed random variables. Assuming that the process starts with a large number of pairs $N$, we prove that its extinction…
The size that an epidemic can reach, measured in terms of the number of fatalities, is an extremely relevant quantity. It has been recently claimed [Cirillo & Taleb, Nature Physics 2020] that the size distribution of major epidemics in…
Scaling laws in astrophysical systems that involve the energy, the geometry, and the spatio-temporal evolution, provide the theoretical framework for physical models of energy dissipation processes. A leading model is the standard…
Motivated by modeling the dynamics of a population living in a flowing medium where the environmental factors are random in space, we have studied an asymmetric variant of the one-dimensional contact process, where the quenched random…
As a result of climate change, many populations have to modify their range to follow the suitable areas - their "climate envelope" - often risking extinction. During this migration process, they may face absolute boundaries to dispersal,…
We introduce a simple computational model that, with a microscopic dynamics driven by natural selection and mutation alone, allows the description of true speciation events. A statistical analysis of the so generated evolutionary tree…