Related papers: Testing a hypothesis for the evolution of sex
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
Human behavior is a dynamic process that evolves with experience. Understanding the evolution of individual's risk propensity is critical to design public health interventions to propitiate the adoption of better biosecurity protocols and…
A trademark of eusocial insect species is reproductive division of labor, in which workers forego their own reproduction while the queen produces almost all offspring. The presence of the queen is key for maintaining social harmony, but the…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
Conjugation is a process in which bacteria exchange DNA through a physical connection (conjugative junction) between mating cells. Despite its significance for processes such as the spread of antibiotic resistance, the role of physical…
The problem of the rate and mechanisms of biological evolution was considered. It was shown that species could not be formed due to undirected mutations in characteristic times of about one million years. A mechanism of deterministic…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
Sex chromosomes have independently evolved in species with separate sexes in most lineages across the tree of life. However, the well-accepted canonical model of sex chromosome evolution is not universally supported. There is no single…
Although the cooperative dynamics emerging from a network of interacting players has been exhaustively investigated, it is not yet fully understood when and how network reciprocity drives cooperation transitions. In this work, we…
This paper suggests that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. With this explanation for the basic cycle, the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution…
Predicting evolution of expanding populations is critical to control biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with examples of…
We have analyzed the relations between the mutational pressure, recombination and selection pressure in the bit-string model with sexual reproduction. For specific sets of these parameters we have found three phase transitions with one…
We provide a probabilistic approach to modeling the movements of subjects through multiple stages, with "stays" or survival at each stage for a random length of time, and ending at a desired final stage. We use conditional Markov chains…
In large asexual populations, multiple beneficial mutations arise in the population, compete, interfere with each other, and accumulate on the same genome, before any of them fix. The resulting dynamics, although studied by many authors, is…
We study the scenarios of the dynamics of ternary statistical experiments, modeled employing difference equations. The important features are a balance condition and the existence of a steady-state (equilibrium). We give a classification of…
Statistical physics can describe the behavior of microbial populations consisting of many heterogeneous individuals. A direct consequence is the existence of phase transitions, where the behavior of a population changes discontinuously upon…
To model the morphogenesis of rod-shaped bacterial micro-colony, several individual-based models have been proposed in the biophysical literature. When studying the shape of micro-colonies, most models present interaction forces such as…
We removed from the Penna model for biological ageing any random killing Verhulst factor. Deaths are due only to genetic diseases and the population size is fixed, instead of fluctuating around some constant value. We show that these…
The biological requirements for an ecosystem to develop and maintain species diversity are in general unknown. Here we consider a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually excluding organisms competing for space [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev.…
Many species of microbes cooperate by producing public goods from which they collectively benefit. However, these populations are under the risk of being taken over by cheating mutants that do not contribute to the pool of public goods.…