Related papers: Tierra's missing neutrality: case solved
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…
George Williams defined an evolutionary unit as hereditary information for which the selection bias between competing units dominates the informational decay caused by imperfect transmission. In this article, I extend Williams' approach to…
The advent of modern genome sequencing techniques allows for a more stringent test of the neutrality hypothesis of Darwinian evolution, where all individuals have the same fitness. Using the individual based model of Wright and Fisher, we…
We develop an theoretical approach for predicting biodiversity in multi-dimensional niche spaces, arising due to ecological drivers such as competitive exclusion. The novelty of our approach relies on the fact that ecological niches are…
Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into…
When a considerable number of mutations have no effects on fitness values, the fitness landscape is said neutral. In order to study the interplay between neutrality, which exists in many real-world applications, and performances of…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of a population structured in phenotype, subjected to trait dependent selection with a linearly moving optimum and an asexual mode of reproduction. Our model consists of a non-local and non-linear…
Forty years ago, Robert May questioned a central belief in ecology by proving that sufficiently large or complex ecological networks have probability of persisting close to zero. To prove this point, he analyzed large networks in which…
The biological requirements for an ecosystem to develop and maintain species diversity are in general unknown. Here we consider a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually excluding organisms competing for space [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev.…
An ongoing debate in ecology concerns the impacts of ecological drift and selection on community assembly. Here, we show that there is a sharp phase transition in diverse ecological communities between a selection dominated regime (the…
We study a version of the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology redefined in a phenotype space where mutants have properties correlated to their parents. The model has individual-based dynamics whilst incorporating species scale…
Spectra of real world networks exhibit properties which are different from the random networks. One such property is the existence of a very high degeneracy at zero eigenvalues. In this work, we provide possible reasons behind occurrence of…
Protein structures are much more conserved than sequences during evolution. Based on this observation, we investigate the consequences of structural conservation on protein evolution. We study seven of the most studied protein folds,…
Understanding the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and is frequently studied by the framework of evolutionary game theory. A very powerful mechanism to promote cooperation is…
The magnitude and variability of Earth's biodiversity have puzzled scientists ever since paleontologic fossil databases became available. We identify and study a model of interdependent species where both endogenous and exogenous impacts…
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…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…
Boolean networks may be viewed as idealizations of biological genetic networks, where each node is represented by an on-off switch which is a function of the binary output from some other nodes. We evolve connectivity in a single Boolean…
The Tangled Nature Model of biological and cultural evolution features interacting agents which compete for limited resources and reproduce in an error prone fashion and at a rate depending on the `tangle' of interactions they maintain with…
Genotype-to-phenotype mappings translate genotypic variations such as mutations into phenotypic changes. Neutrality is the observation that some mutations do not lead to phenotypic changes. Studying the search trajectories in genotypic and…