Related papers: A model of macroevolution with a natural system si…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
We study the biodiversity problem for resource competition systems with extinctions and self-limitation effects. Our main result establishes estimates of biodiversity in terms of the fundamental parameters of the model. We also prove the…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Isolated populations ultimately go extinct because of the intrinsic noise of elementary processes. In multi-population systems extinction of a population may occur via more than one route. We investigate this generic situation in a simple…
We are interested in the impact of natural selection in a prey-predator community. We introduce an individual-based model of the community that takes into account both prey and predator phenotypes. Our aim is to understand the phenotypic…
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…
This paper concerns the modeling and numerical simulation of the process of speciation. In particular, given conditions for which one or more speciation events within an ecosystem occur, our aim is to develop the necessary modeling and…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
A bit-string model for the evolution of a population of haploid organisms, subject to competition, reproduction with mutation and selection is studied, using mean field theory and Monte Carlo simulations. We show that, depending on…
When three species compete cyclically in a well-mixed, stochastic system of $N$ individuals, extinction is known to typically occur at times scaling as the system size $N$. This happens, for example, in rock-paper-scissors games or…
Both evolution and ecology have long been concerned with the impact of variable environmental conditions on observed levels of genetic diversity within and between species. We model the evolution of a quantitative trait under selection that…
If predictions for species extinctions hold, then the `tree of life' today may be quite different to that in (say) 100 years. We describe a technique to quantify how much each species is likely to contribute to future biodiversity, as…
We propose a minimal model of the dynamics of diversity -- replicator equations with extinction, invasion and mutation. We numerically study the behavior of this simple model and show that it displays completely different behavior from the…
Using as a narrative theme the example of Darwin's finches, a microscopic agent-based model is introduces to study sympatric speciation as a result of competition for resources in the same ecological niche. Varying competition among…
This review is an introduction to theoretical models and mathematical calculations for biological evolution, aimed at physicists. The methods in the field are naturally very similar to those used in statistical physics, although the…
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…
We consider the effect of network structure on the evolution of a population. Models of this kind typically consider a population of fixed size and distribution. Here we consider eco-evolutionary dynamics where population size and…
We present a stochastic model for the size of a taxon in paleobiology, in which we allow for the evolution of new taxon members, and both individual and catastrophic extinction events. The model uses ideas from the theory of birth and death…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
We propose a class of evolutionary models that involves an arbitrary exchangeable process as the breeding process and different selection schemes. In those models, a new genome is born according to the breeding process, and then a genome is…