Related papers: Effect of Variable Surrounding on Species Creation

A class of models for large-scale evolution and mass extinctions is presented. These models incorporate environmental changes on all scales, from influences on a single species to global effects. This is a step towards a unified picture of…

We present a model for evolution and extinction in large ecosystems. The model incorporates the effects of interactions between species and the influences of abiotic environmental factors. We study the properties of the model by approximate…

The Penna bit-string model successfully encompasses many phenomena of population evolution, including inheritance, mutation, evolution and ageing. If we consider social interactions among individuals in the Penna model, the population will…

Evolutionary branching is analysed in a stochastic, individual-based population model under mutation and selection. In such models, the common assumption is that individual reproduction and life career are characterised by values of a…

Sexual selection theory models evolution of sexual signals and preferences using simple life histories. However, life-history models predict that males benefit from increasing sexual investment approaching old age, producing age-dependent…

Having a precise knowledge of the dispersal ability of a population in a heterogeneous environment is of critical importance in agroecology and conservation biology as it can provide management tools to limit the effects of pests or to…

Positive selection distorts the structure of genealogies and hence alters patterns of genetic variation within a population. Most analyses of these distortions focus on the signatures of hitchhiking due to hard or soft selective sweeps at a…

Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…

The general tendency for species number (S) to increase with sampled area (A) constitutes one of the most robust empirical laws of ecology, quantified by species-area relationships (SAR). In many ecosystems, SAR curves display a power-law…

Variability on external conditions has important consequences for the dynamics and the organization of biological systems. In many cases, the characteristic timescale of environmental changes as well as their correlations play a fundamental…

Populations of species in ecosystems are often constrained by availability of resources within their environment. In effect this means that a growth of one population, needs to be balanced by comparable reduction in populations of others.…

In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…

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.…

Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…

While the use of spatial agent-based and individual-based models has flourished across many scientific disciplines, the complexities these models generate are often difficult to manage and quantify. This research reduces population-driven,…

The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…

Current-day genomes bear the mark of the evolutionary processes. One of the strongest indications is the sequence homology among families of proteins that perform similar biological functions in different species. The number of proteins in…

The environment in which a population evolves can have a crucial impact on selection. We study evolutionary dynamics in finite populations of fixed size in a changing environment. The population dynamics are driven by birth and death…

Many theoretical models have been formulated to better understand the coevolutionary patterns that emerge from antagonistic interactions. These models usually assume that the attacks by the exploiters are random, so the effect of victim…

The equations of evolutionary change by natural selection are commonly expressed in statistical terms. Fisher's fundamental theorem emphasizes the variance in fitness. Quantitative genetics expresses selection with covariances and…