Related papers: Group selection models in prebiotic evolution
What is motivation and how does it work? Where do goals come from and how do they vary within and between species and individuals? Why do we prefer some things over others? MEDO is a theoretical framework for understanding these questions…
Understanding how the structure of community interactions is modified by coevolution is vital for understanding system responses to change at all scales. However, in absence of a group selection process, collective community behaviours…
Cooperation is prevalent in nature, not only in the context of social interactions within the animal kingdom, but also on the cellular level. In cancer for example, tumour cells can cooperate by producing growth factors. The evolution of…
This paper is concerned with developing mean-field game models for the evolution of epidemics. Specifically, an agent's decision -- to be socially active in the midst of an epidemic -- is modeled as a mean-field game with health-related…
Two mechanisms that have been used to study the evolution of cooperative behavior are altruistic punishment, in which cooperative individuals pay additional costs to punish defection, and multilevel selection, in which competition between…
Mutualistic interactions, where individuals from different species can benefit from each other, are widespread across ecosystems. This study develops a general deterministic model of mutualism involving two populations, assuming that…
Building ethical machines may involve bestowing upon them the emotional capacity to self-evaluate and repent on their actions. While apologies represent potential strategic interactions, the explicit evolution of guilt as a behavioural…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
In past work, we developed a computational model of the evolution of symbiotic entities (Model-S), based on Conway's Game of Life. In this article, we examine three trends that biologists have observed in the evolution of symbiotes. (1)…
Kin selection theory has proven to be a popular and widely accepted account of how altruistic behaviour can evolve under natural selection. Hamilton's rule, first published in 1964, has since been experimentally validated across a range of…
A theoretical model is presented for early evolutionary cell sorting within cellular aggregates. The model involves an energy-saving mechanism and principles of collective self-organization analogous to those observed in bicycle pelotons…
Evolutionary transitions among ecological interactions are widely known, although their detailed dynamics remain absent for most population models. Adaptive dynamics has been used to illustrate how the parameters of population models might…
In numerous contexts, individuals may decide whether they take actions to mitigate the spread of disease, or not. Mitigating the spread of disease requires an individual to change their routine behaviours to benefit others, resulting in a…
We explore the evolution of cooperation in the framework of the evolutionary game theory using the prisoner's dilemma as metaphor of the problem. We present a minimal model taking into account the growing process of the systems and…
At an early stage in pre-biotic evolution, groups of replicating molecules must coordinate their reproduction to form aggregated units of selection. Mechanisms that enable this to occur are currently not well understood. In this paper we…
Microbial colonies are experimental model systems for studying the colonization of new territory by biological species through range expansion. We study a generalization of the two-species Eden model, which incorporates local…
Experimental studies have shown the ubiquity of altruistic behavior in human societies. The social structure is a fundamental ingredient to understand the degree of altruism displayed by the members of a society, in contrast to…
We study the evolution of artificial learning systems by means of selection. Genetic programming is used to generate a sequence of populations of algorithms which can be used by neural networks for supervised learning of a rule that…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…