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Evolutionary game theory is a powerful framework for studying evolution in populations of interacting individuals. A common assumption in evolutionary game theory is that interactions are symmetric, which means that the players are…
Most non-synonymous mutations are thought to be deleterious because of their effect on protein sequence. These polymorphisms are expected to be removed or kept at low frequency by the action of natural selection, and rare deleterious…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
BACKGROUND: Many of the mutations accumulated by naturally evolving proteins are neutral in the sense that they do not significantly alter a protein's ability to perform its primary biological function. However, new protein functions evolve…
Evolutionary game theory is used to model the evolution of competing strategies in a population of players. Evolutionary stability of a strategy is a dynamic equilibrium, in which any competing mutated strategy would be wiped out from a…
The ecological principle of limiting similarity dictates that species similar in resource requirements will compete, with the superior eventually excluding the inferior competitor from the community. The observation that nonetheless…
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…
For many organisms, the number of sensory neurons is largely determined during development, before strong environmental cues are present. This is despite the fact that environments can fluctuate drastically both from generation to…
We study a general setting of neutral evolution in which the population is of finite, constant size and can have spatial structure. Mutation leads to different genetic types ("traits"), which can be discrete or continuous. Under minimal…
Here we propose a generic mechanism - networked buffering - for generating robust traits in complex systems that requires two basic conditions to be satisfied: 1) agents are versatile enough to perform more than one single functional role…
Understanding how systems can be designed to be evolvable is fundamental to research in optimization, evolution, and complex systems science. Many researchers have thus recognized the importance of evolvability, i.e. the ability to find new…
Environmental fluctuations have important consequences in the organization of ecological communities, and understanding how such a variability influences the biodiversity of an ecosystem is a major question in ecology. In this paper, we…
Horizontal transfer (HT) of heritable information or `traits' (carried by genetic elements, endosymbionts, or culture) is widespread among living organisms. Yet current ecological and evolutionary theory addressing HT is limited. We present…
We consider evolution of a large population, where fitness of each organism is defined by many phenotypical traits. These traits result from expression of many genes. We propose a new model of gene regulation, where gene expression is…
Evolutionary algorithms borrow from biology the concepts of mutation and selection in order to evolve optimized solutions to known problems. The GENETIS collaboration is developing genetic algorithms for designing antennas that are more…
A biologically motivated individual-based framework for evolution in network-structured populations is developed that can accommodate eco-evolutionary dynamics. This framework is used to construct a network birth and death model. The…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics in directed and/or weighted networks. We study the fixation probability of a mutant in finite populations in stochastic voter-type dynamics for several update rules. The fixation probability is…
The effects of networking on the extent of cooperation emerging in a competitive setting are studied. The evolutionary snowdrift game, which represents a realistic alternative to the well-known Prisoner's Dilemma, is studied in the…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Research on the vulnerability of electric networks with a complex network approach has produced significant results in the last decade, especially for transmission networks. These studies have shown that there are causal relations between…