Related papers: Tierra's missing neutrality: case solved
We apply the theory of learning to physically renormalizable systems in an attempt to develop a theory of biological evolution, including the origin of life, as multilevel learning. We formulate seven fundamental principles of evolution…
Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…
Cooperation lies at the foundations of human societies, yet why people cooperate remains a conundrum. The issue, known as network reciprocity, of whether population structure can foster cooperative behavior in social dilemmas has been…
Mutualistic interactions are widespread in nature, from plant communities and microbiomes to human organizations. Along with competition for resources, cooperative interactions shape biodiversity and contribute to the robustness of complex…
The consensus that complexity begets stability in ecosystems was challenged in the seventies, a result recently extended to ecologically-inspired networks. The approaches assume the existence of a feasible equilibrium, i.e. with positive…
Natural birth and death are fundamental mechanisms of population dynamics in ecosystems and have played pivotal roles in shaping population dynamics. Nevertheless, in studies of cyclic competition systems governed by the rock-paper-scissors…
Notions of Darwinian selection have been implicit in economic theory for at least sixty years. Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter have argued that while evolutionary thinking was prevalent in prewar economics, the postwar Neoclassical school…
We present novel analytical results about ecosystem species diversity that stem from a proposed coarse grained neutral model based on birth-death processes. The relevance of the problem lies in the urgency for understanding and synthesizing…
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…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of a finite population of RNA sequences adapting to a neutral fitness landscape. Despite the lack of differential fitness between viable sequences, we observe typical properties of adaptive…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
Global environmental change is affecting species distribution and their interactions with other species. In particular, the main drivers of environmental change strongly affect the strength of interspecific interactions with considerable…
We simulate neutral evolution of proteins imposing conservation of the thermodynamic stability of the native state in the framework of an effective model of folding thermodynamics. This procedure generates evolutionary trajectories in…
Patterns of nestedness and specialization asymmetry, where specialist species interact mainly with generalists while generalists interact with both generalists and specialists, are often observed in mutualistic and antagonistic bi-partite…
New automated and high-throughput methods allow the manipulation and selection of numerous bacterial populations. In this manuscript we are interested in the neutral diversity patterns that emerge from such a setup in which many bacterial…
The evolutionary relationships between species are typically represented in the biological literature by rooted phylogenetic trees. However, a tree fails to capture ancestral reticulate processes, such as the formation of hybrid species or…
Mays celebrated theoretical work of the 70s contradicted the established paradigm by demonstrating that complexity leads to instability in biological systems. Here Mays random-matrix modelling approach is generalized to realistic…
We study the dynamics of a population subject to selective pressures, evolving either on RNA neutral networks or in toy fitness landscapes. We discuss the spread and the neutrality of the population in the steady state. Different limits…
The question what determines the structure of natural food webs has been listed among the nine most important unanswered questions in ecology. It arises naturally from many problems related to ecosystem stability and resilience. The…
Nested structure, which is non-random, controls cooperation dynamics and biodiversity in plant-animal mutualistic networks. This structural pattern has been explained in a static (non-growth) network models. However, evolutionary processes…