Related papers: The case of the missing neutrality
We find that the hypothesis made by Jan, Stauffer and Moseley [Theory in Biosc., 119, 166 (2000)] for the evolution of sex, namely a strategy devised to escape extinction due to too many deleterious mutations, is sufficient but not…
We give a overview of stochastic models of evolution that have found applications in genetics, ecology and linguistics for an audience of nonspecialists, especially statistical physicists. In particular, we focus mostly on neutral models in…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Genetic drift is stochastic fluctuations of alleles frequencies in a population due to sampling effects. We consider a model of drift in an equilibrium population, with high mutation rates: few functional mutations per generation. Such…
An attempt to use phylogenetic invariants for tree reconstruction was made at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s by several authors (the initial idea due to Lake and Cavender and Felsenstein in 1987. However, the efficiency of…
This paper introduces a speciation principle for neuroevolution where evolving networks are grouped into species based on the number of hidden neurons, which is indicative of the complexity of the search space. This speciation principle is…
The scientific community believes in the theory of evolution with a passion that rivals that of any religious belief. This passion extends beyond the irrefutable evidence of the fossil record to the familiar claims of survival of the…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
Biological networks of interacting agents exhibit similar topological properties for a wide range of scales, from cellular to ecological levels, suggesting the existence of a common evolutionary origin. A general evolutionary mechanism…
Understanding the causes and effects of network structural features is a key task in deciphering complex systems. In this context, the property of network nestedness has aroused a fair amount of interest as regards ecological networks.…
Mutational robustness quantifies the effect of random mutations on fitness. When mutational robustness is high, most mutations do not change fitness or have only a minor effect on it. From the point of view of fitness landscapes, robust…
We present a version of the classical Moran model, in which mutations are taken into account; the possibility of mutations was introduced by Moran in his seminal paper, but it is more often overlooked in discussing the Moran model. For this…
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…
Bipartite networks provide an insightful representation of many systems, ranging from mutualistic networks of species interactions to investment networks in finance. The analysis of their topological structures has revealed the ubiquitous…
We view the folding of RNA-sequences as a map that assigns a pattern of base pairings to each sequence, known as secondary structure. These preimages can be constructed as random graphs (i.e. the neutral networks associated to the structure…
Evolution depends on the possibility of successfully exploring fitness landscapes via mutation and recombination. With these search procedures, exploration is difficult in "rugged" fitness landscapes, where small mutations can drastically…
There are diverse mechanisms driving the evolution of social networks. A key open question dealing with understanding their evolution is: How various preferential linking mechanisms produce networks with different features? In this paper we…
In a short article submitted to ArXiv [1], Maddamsetti et al. argue that the variation in the neutral mutation rate among genes in Escherichia coli that we recently reported [2] might be explained by horizontal gene transfer (HGT). To…
The replicator-mutator dynamic was originally derived to model the evolution of language, and since the model was derived in such a general manner, it has been applied to the dynamics of social behavior and decision making in multi-agent…
The idea that all life on earth traces back to a common beginning dates back at least to Charles Darwin's {\em Origin of Species}. Ever since, biologists have tried to piece together parts of this `tree of life' based on what we can observe…