Related papers: Dynamics of clade diversification on the morpholog…
Until recently, much of the microbial world was hidden from view. A global research effort has changed this, unveiling and quantifying microbial diversity across enormous range of critically-important contexts, from the human microbiome, to…
Mollusk shells are an ideal model system for understanding the morpho-elastic basis of morphological evolution of invertebrates' exoskeletons. During the formation of the shell, the mantle tissue secretes proteins and minerals that calcify…
We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…
We present results of a long-term team collaboration of mathematicians and biologists. We focus on building a mathematical framework for the shape space constituted by a collection of homologous bones or teeth from many species. The…
The evolution of biological morphology is critical for understanding the diversity of the natural world, yet traditional analyses often involve subjective biases in the selection and coding of morphological traits. This study employs deep…
During bouts of evolutionary diversification, such as adaptive radiations, the emerging species cluster around different locations in phenotype space, How such multimodal patterns in phenotype space can emerge from a single ancestral…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
Deep surveys conducted during the past decades have shown that galaxies in the distant universe are generally of more irregular shapes, and are disky in appearance and in their star formation rate, compared to galaxies in similar…
The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential…
Dynamics maintaining diversity of cell types in a multi-cellular system are studied in relationship with the plasticity of cellular states. First, we introduce a new theoretical framework, reaction-diffusion system on `chemical species…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…
A number of methods have been developed to infer differential rates of species diversification through time and among clades using time-calibrated phylogenetic trees. However, we lack a general framework that can delineate and quantify…
Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…
Bacteria evolve in volatile environments and complex spatial structures. Migration, fluctuations and environmental variability therefore have a significant impact on the evolution of microbial populations. Here, we consider a class of…
The branching structure of biological evolution confers statistical dependencies on phenotypic trait values in related organisms. For this reason, comparative macroevolutionary studies usually begin with an inferred phylogeny that describes…
A phase-separation front will leave in its wake a phase-separated morphology that differs markedly from homogeneous phase-separation morphologies. For a purely diffusive system such a front, moving with constant velocity, will generate very…
Dogs exhibit an exceptional range of morphological diversity as a result of their long-term association with humans. Attempts to identify when dog morphological variation began to expand have been constrained by the limited number of…
For taxonomic levels higher than species, the abundance distributions of number of subtaxa per taxon tend to approximate power laws, but often show strong deviationns from such a law. Previously, these deviations were attributed to…
Organismal phenotypes emerge from a complex set of genotypic interactions. While technological advances in sequencing provide a quantitative description of an organism's genotype, characterization of an organism's physical phenotype lags…