Related papers: Testing a hypothesis for the evolution of sex
The vast majority of multi-cellular organisms are anisogamous, meaning that male and female sex cells differ in size. It remains an open question how this asymmetric state evolved, presumably from the symmetric isogamous state where all…
The death of a biological population is an extreme event which we investigate here for a host-parasitoid system. Our simulations using the Penna ageing model show how biological evolution can ``teach'' the parasitoids to avoid extinction by…
No abstract given. Confirms earlier simulatiobns of the self-organization of dominance in the sexual Penna model, and the advantage of hermaphroditic over sexual reproduction.
The proposition that life can spread from one planetary system to another (interstellar panspermia) has a long history, but this hypothesis is difficult to test through observations. We develop a mathematical model that takes parameters…
The Penna model is a model of evolutionary ageing through mutation accumulation where traditionally time and the age of an organism are treated as discrete variables and an organism's genome by a binary bit string. We reformulate the…
In the spirit of the many recent simple models of evolution inspired by statistical physics, we put forward a simple model of the evolution of such models. Like its objects of study, it is (one supposes) in principle testable and capable of…
We have simulated demographic changes in the human population using the Penna microscopic model, based on the simple Monte Carlo method. The results of simulations have shown that during a few generations changes in the genetic pool of a…
Which factors govern the evolution of mutation rates and emergence of species? Here, we address this question using a first principles model of life where population dynamics of asexual organisms is coupled to molecular properties and…
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…
We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…
We consider populations structured by a phenotypic trait and a space variable, in a non-homogeneous environment. In the case of sex- ual populations, we are able to derive models close to existing mod- els in theoretical biology, from a…
Recent research has extended methods from the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into other disciplines. Most notably, one recent work creates a unified theoretical framework to understand evolutionary biology, machine…
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…
Recently, Lenski et al have carried out an experiment on bacterial evolution. Their findings support the theory of punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution. We show that the M=2 Bak-Sneppen model can explain some of the experimental…
Migration between different habitats is ubiquitous among biological populations. In this Letter, we study a simple quasispecies model for evolution in two different habitats, with different fitness landscapes, coupled through one-way…
The vast majority of mutations are deleterious, and are eliminated by purifying selection. Yet in finite asexual populations, purifying selection cannot completely prevent the accumulation of deleterious mutations due to Muller's ratchet:…
The long-term growth rate of populations in varying environments quantifies the evolutionary value of processing the information that biological individuals inherit from their ancestors and acquire from their environment. Previous models…
Background: Hybridogenesis is a very interesting example of reproduction which seems to integrate the sexual and clonal processes in one system. In a case of frogs, described in the paper, two parental species - Rana lessonae and Rana…
The theory of lithopanspermia proposes the natural exchange of organisms between solar system bodies through meteorites. The focus of this theory comprises three distinct stages: planetary ejection, interplanetary transit and planetary…
A stochastic genetic model for biological aging is introduced bridging the gap between the bit-string Penna model and the Pletcher-Neuhauser approach. The phenomenon of exponentially increasing mortality function at intermediate ages and…