Related papers: A Simple Model of Evolution with Variable System S…
This paper investigates the stability of the power-law steady state often observed in marine ecosystems. Three dynamical systems are considered, describing the abundance of organisms as a function of body mass and time: a "jump-growth"…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution through mutation and natural selection of a population that evolves on a $\bbT_d^+$ tree. We think of this model as a way of describing the evolution fitness landscape of a population. We obtain…
The causes of major and rapid transitions observed in biological macroevolution as well as in the evolution of social systems are a subject of much debate. Here we identify the proximate causes of crashes and recoveries that arise…
Theoretical ecologists have long sought to understand how the persistence of populations depends on biotic and abiotic factors. Classical work showed that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase…
Many species see their range shifted poleward in response to global warming and need to keep pace in order to survive. To understand the effect of climate change on species ranges and its consequences on population dynamics, we consider a…
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…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
We present some results of simulations of population growth and evolution, using the standard asexual Penna model, with individuals characterized by a string of bits representing a genome containing some possible mutations. After about…
Extinction of a long-lived isolated stochastic population can be described as an exponentially slow decay of quasi-stationary probability distribution of the population size. We address extinction of a population in a two-population system…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Near the beginning of the century, Wright and Fisher devised an elegant, mathematically tractable model of gene reproduction and replacement that laid the foundation for contemporary population genetics. The Wright-Fisher model and its…
Populations experience a complex interplay of continuous and discrete processes: continuous growth and interactions are punctuated by discrete reproduction events, dispersal, and external disturbances. These dynamics can be modeled by…
We aim to understand the evolution of the genetic composition of cancer cell populations. To achieve this, we consider an individual-based model representing a cell population where cells divide, die and mutate along the edges of a finite…
Simulations of the coevolution of many interacting species are performed using the Webworld model. The model has a realistic set of predator-prey equations that describe the population dynamics of the species for any structure of the food…
This paper is devoted to the study of persistence and extinction of a species modeled by nonlocal dispersal evolution equations in moving habitats with moving speed $c$. It is shown that the species becomes extinct if the moving speed $c$…
Extinction times in resampling processes are fundamental yet often intractable, as previous formulas scale as $2^M$ with the number of states $M$ present in the initial probability distribution. We solve this by treating multinomial updates…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
Given that extinction in a bisexual population is certain, we study a way to approximate the time when this extinction occurs. Our study is based on standard tools from Extreme Value Theory, which in practice are very easy to implement. We…
Two basic features of assemblages of unicellular plankton: (1) their high biodiversity and (2) the power-law structure of their abundance, can be explained by an allometric scaling of cell growth and mortality with respect to cell size. To…