Related papers: Tierra's missing neutrality: case solved
We used an ecological approach based on a neutral model to study the competition for attention in an online social network. This novel approach allow us to analyze some ecological patterns that has also an insightful meaning in the context…
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…
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…
Over time, a population acquires neutral genetic substitutions as a consequence of random drift. A famous result in population genetics asserts that the rate, $K$, at which these substitutions accumulate in the population coincides with the…
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…
Mutualistic networks have been shown to involve complex patterns of interactions among animal and plant species. The architecture of these webs seems to pervade some of their robust and fragile behaviour. Recent work indicates that there is…
Darwin introduced the concept of the "living fossil" to describe species belonging to lineages that have experienced little evolutionary change, and suggested that species in more slowly evolving lineages are more prone to extinction (1).…
The outcome of competition among species is influenced by the spatial distribution of species and effects such as demographic stochasticity, immigration fluxes, and the existence of preferred habitats. We introduce an individual-based model…
Cooperation is a difficult proposition in the face of Darwinian selection. Those that defect have an evolutionary advantage over cooperators who should therefore die out. However, spatial structure enables cooperators to survive through the…
We describe the evolution of macromolecules as an information transmission process and apply tools from Shannon information theory to it. This allows us to isolate three independent, competing selective pressures that we term compression,…
Many complex systems can be described in terms of networks of interacting units. Recent studies have shown that a wide class of both natural and artificial nets display a surprisingly widespread feature: the presence of highly heterogeneous…
A classic measure of ecological stability describes the tendency of a community to return to equilibrium after small perturbation. While many advances show how the network structure of these communities severely constrains such tendencies,…
Competition is the main driver of population dynamics, which shapes the genetic composition of populations and the assembly of ecological communities. Neutral models assume that all the individuals are equivalent and that the dynamics is…
Heterozygote disadvantage is potentially a potent driver of population genetic divergence. Also referred to as underdominance, this phenomena describes a situation where a genetic heterozygote has a lower overall fitness than either…
We study a model of a multi-species ecosystem described by Lotka-Volterra-like equations. Interactions among species form a network whose evolution is determined by the dynamics of the model. Numerical simulations show power-law…
Genotype networks are a method used in systems biology to study the "innovability" of a set of genotypes having the same phenotype. In the past they have been applied to determine the genetic heterogeneity, and stability to mutations, of…
To what extent do the characteristic features of a chemical reaction network reflect its purpose and function? In general, one argues that correlations between specific features and specific functions are key to understanding a complex…
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…
According to the competitive exclusion principle, in a finite ecosystem, extinction occurs naturally when two or more species compete for the same resources. An important question that arises is: when coexistence is not possible, which…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…