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Mutualistic interactions, which are beneficial for both interacting species, are recurrently present in ecosystems. Observations of natural systems showed that, if we draw mutualistic relationships as binary links between species, the…
From the perfect radial symmetries of radiolarian mineral skeletons to the broken symmetry of homochirality, the logic of Nature's regularities has fascinated scientists for centuries. Some of Nature's symmetries are clearly visible in…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Situations involving cooperative behaviour are widespread among animals and humans alike. Game theory and evolutionary dynamics have provided the theoretical and computational grounds to understand what are the mechanisms that allow for…
One of the problems in applying Genetic Algorithm is that there is some situation where the evolutionary process converges too fast to a solution which causes it to be trapped in local optima. To overcome this problem, a proper diversity in…
Microbial communities routinely have several possible species compositions or community states observed for the same environmental parameters. Changes in these parameters can trigger abrupt and persistent transitions (regime shifts) between…
Standard neutral population genetics theory with a strictly fixed population size has important limitations. An alternative model that allows independently fluctuating population sizes and reproduces the standard neutral evolution is…
A square lattice is introduced into the Penna model for biological aging in order to study the evolution of diploid sexual populations under certain conditions when one single locus in the individual's genome is considered as identifier of…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
In complex systems, the interplay between nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, e.g., J. Monod's necessity and chance, gives rise to an evolutionary process in Darwinian sense, in terms of discrete jumps among attractors, with punctuated…
Plant domestication involved a process of selection through human agency of a series of traits collectively termed the domestication syndrome. Current debate concerns the pace at which domesticated plants emerged from cultivated wild…
We suggest a novel approach to treating symbiotic relations between biological species or social entities. The main idea is the characterisation of symbiotic relations of coexisting species through their mutual influence on their respective…
Two-sided matching markets describe a large class of problems wherein participants from one side of the market must be matched to those from the other side according to their preferences. In many real-world applications (e.g. content…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…
Suppose that females choose males based on attributes that do not signal any genetic quality that is not related to the choice itself. Can being choosy confer selective advantage in this situation? We introduce correlated strategies, which…
The origin of diversification and coexistence of genes and species have been traditionally studied in isolated biological levels. Ecological and evolutionary views have focused on the mechanisms that enable or constrain species coexistence,…
The puzzle associated with the cost of sex, an old problem of evolutionary biology, is discussed here from the point of view of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. The results suggest, in a simplified model, that the prevalence of sexual…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
Several studies question the adaptive value of female preferences for older males. Theory and evidence show that older males carry more deleterious mutations in their sperm than younger males carry. These mutations are not visible to…