Related papers: A Problem in Paleobiology
We consider the time evolution of the supercritical Galton-Watson model of branching particles with extra parameter (mass). In the moment of the division the mass of the particle (which is growing linearly after the birth) is divided in…
We introduce the Webworld model, which links together the ecological modelling of food web structure with the evolutionary modelling of speciation and extinction events. The model describes dynamics of ecological communities on an…
Stochastic reaction networks are mathematical models with a wide range of applications in biochemistry, ecology, and epidemiology, and are often complex to analyze. Except for some special cases, it is generally difficult to predict how the…
We are interested in modeling Darwinian evolution resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. The population is modeled as a stochastic point process whose generator captures…
Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…
With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…
Cells of the human body have nearly identical genome but exhibit very different phenotypes that allow them to carry out specific functions and react to changes in their surrounding environment. This division of labour is achieved by…
We study a discrete-time stochastic process that can also be interpreted as a model for a viral evolution. A distinguishing feature of our process is power-law tails due to dynamics that resembles preferential attachment models. In the…
We propose the following simple stochastic model for phylogenetic trees. New types are born and die according to a birth and death chain. At each birth we associate a fitness to the new type sampled from a fixed distribution. At each death…
Statistical analysis indicates that the fossil extinction record is compatible with a distribution of extinction events whose frequency is related to their size by a power law with an exponent close to two. This result is in agreement with…
We introduce a simple computational model that, with a microscopic dynamics driven by natural selection and mutation alone, allows the description of true speciation events. A statistical analysis of the so generated evolutionary tree…
We present a quantitative model for the biological evolution of species body masses within large groups of related species, e.g., terrestrial mammals, in which body mass M evolves according to branching (speciation), multiplicative…
Stochastic dynamical systems arise naturally across nearly all areas of science and engineering. Typically, a dynamical system model is based on some prior knowledge about the underlying dynamics of interest in which probabilistic features…
Spatial metapopulation models are fundamental to theoretical ecology, enabling to study how landscape structure influences global species dynamics. Traditional models, including recent generalizations, often rely on the deterministic limit…
A wide variety of stochastic models of cladogenesis (based on speciation and extinction) lead to an identical distribution on phylogenetic tree shapes once the edge lengths are ignored. By contrast, the distribution of the tree's edge…
Yule's 1925 paper introducing the branching model that bears his name was a landmark contribution to the biodiversity sciences. In his paper, Yule developed stochastic models to explain the observed distribution of species across genera and…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
We present a generalization of the Yule model for macroevolution in which, for the appearance of genera, we consider point processes with the order statistics property, while for the growth of species we use nonlinear time-fractional pure…
We consider a stochastic model for species evolution. A new species is born at rate lambda and a species dies at rate mu. A random number, sampled from a given distribution F, is associated with each new species at the time of birth. Every…