Related papers: Mass Extinctions vs. Uniformitarianism in Biologic…

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…

Mortality is an instrument of natural selection. Evolutionary motivated theories imply its irreversibility and life history dependence. This is inconsistent with mortality data for protected populations. Accurate analysis yields mortality…

We study the biodiversity problem for resource competition systems with extinctions and self-limitation effects. Our main result establishes estimates of biodiversity in terms of the fundamental parameters of the model. We also prove the…

Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…

We study a class of branching processes in which the offspring distribution is not specified directly but is induced by a cycle of internal colony growth, catastrophic reduction and structured dispersal. The parameters governing growth,…

By driven to extinction species less or poorly adapted, the Darwinian evolutionary theory is intrinsically an optimization theory. We investigate two optimization algorithms with such evolutionary characteristics: the Bak-Sneppen and the…

Cyclic dominance between species may yield spiral waves that are known to provide a mechanism enabling persistent species coexistence. This observation holds true even in presence of spatial heterogeneity in the form of quenched disorder.…

Here we postulate three laws which form a mathematical framework to capture the essence of Darwinian evolutionary dynamics. The second law is most quantitative and is explicitly expressed by a unique form of stochastic differential…

Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…

The basic mechanics of evolution have been understood since Darwin. But debate continues over whether macroevolutionary phenomena are driven primary by the fitness structure of genotype space or by ecological interaction. In this paper we…

We introduce a model of biological evolution where species evolve in response to biotic interactions and a fluctuating environmental stress. The species may either become extinct or mutate to acquire a new fitness value when the effective…

Food-web perturbations stemming from climate change, overexploitation, invasive species, and habitat degradation often cause an initial loss of species that results in a cascade of secondary extinctions, posing considerable challenges to…

Darwinian dynamics is manifestly stochastic and nonconservative, but has a profound connection to conservative dynamics in physics. In the present paper the main ideas and logical steps leading to thermodynamics from Darwinian dynamics are…

Ecological and evolutionary processes show various population dynamics depending on internal interactions and environmental changes. While crucial in predicting biological processes, discovering general relations for such nonlinear dynamics…

A central issue in ecology today is that of the factors determining the relative abundance of species within a natural community. The proper application of the principles of statistical physics to the problem of species abundance…

Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…

We pursue research leading towards the nature of causality in the universe. We establish the equation of the universe's evolution from the universe-state function and its series expansion, in which causes and effects connect together to…

Mathematical models of population extinction have a variety of applications in such areas as ecology, paleontology and conservation biology. Here we propose and investigate two types of sub-exponential models of population extinction.The…

We show how highly-diverse ecological communities may display persistent abundance fluctuations, when interacting through resource competition and subjected to migration from a species pool. This turns out to be closely related to the ratio…

The dynamics of two competing species in a finite size community is one of the most studied problems in population genetics and community ecology. Stochastic fluctuations lead, inevitably, to the extinction of one of the species, but the…