Related papers: Mass Extinctions vs. Uniformitarianism in Biologic…
Quantum Darwinism explains the emergence of classical reality from the underlying quantum reality by the fact that a quantum system is observed indirectly, by looking at parts of its environment, so that only specific information about the…
The timeline of the Earth's history reveals quasi-periodicity of the geological record over the last 542 Myr, on timescales close, in the order of magnitude, to 1 Myr. What is the origin of this quasi-periodicity? What is the nature of the…
We study a mechanistic mathematical model of extinction and coexistence in a generic hunter-prey ecosystem. The model represents typical scenarios of human invasion and environmental change, characteristic of the late Pleistocene,…
Global, population-wide oscillations in models of cyclic dominance may result in the collapse of biodiversity due to the accidental extinction of one species in the loop. Previous research has shown that such oscillations can emerge if the…
We consider a branching random walk in a random space-time environment of disasters where each particle is killed when meeting a disaster. This extends the model of the "random walk in a disastrous random environment" introduced by [15]. We…
In a recent paper, we applied time series analysis methods to study the possible influence of the solar motion through the Galaxy on terrestrial extinction (Feng & Bailer-Jones 2013). We drew conclusions about the relative probabilities of…
The natural evolution of life seems to proceed through steps characterized by phases of relatively rapid changes, followed by longer, more stable periods. In the light of the string-theory derived physical scenario proposed in [1], we…
We introduce a model for the evolution of species triggered by generation of novel features and exhaustive combination with other available traits. Under the assumption that innovations are rare, we obtain a bursty branching process of…
We study the Tangled Nature model of macro evolution and demonstrate that the co-evolutionary dynamics produces an increasingly correlated core of well occupied types. At the same time the entire configuration of types becomes increasing…
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 idea of a metapopulation has become canonical in ecology. Its original mean field form provides the important intuition that migration and extinction interact to determine the dynamics of a population composed of subpopulations. From…
We finely describe the "coming down from infinity" for birth and death processes which eventually become extinct. Our biological motivation is to study the decrease of regulated populations which are initially large. Under general…
Well known biological approximations are universal, i.e. invariant to transformations from one species to another. With no other experimental data, such invariance yields exact conservation (with respect to biological diversity and…
The Galaxy and the stars in it form a hierarchical system, such that the properties of individual stars are influenced by those of the Galaxy. Here, an approach is described which uses hierarchical Bayesian models to simultaneously and…
A mass ejection model in a time-dependent random environment with both temporal and spatial correlations is introduced. When the environment has a finite correlation length, individual particle trajectories are found to diffuse at large…
We consider the problem of extinction processes on random networks with a given structure. For sufficiently large well-mixed populations, the process of extinction of one or more state variable components occurs in the tail of the…
Population dynamics of a competitive two-species system under the influence of random events are analyzed and expressions for the steady-state population mean, fluctuations, and cross-correlation of the two species are presented. It is…
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…
We analyze a general theory for coexistence and extinction of ecological communities that are influenced by stochastic temporal environmental fluctuations. The results apply to discrete time (stochastic difference equations), continuous…
A model of the dynamics of natural rotifer populations is described as a discrete nonlinear map depending on three parameters, which reflect characteristics of the population and environment. Model dynamics and their change by variation of…