Related papers: Statistics of Certain Models of Evolution
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
A simple model economy with locally interacting producers and consumers is introduced. When driven by extremal dynamics, the model self-organizes {\em not} to an attractor state, but to an asymptote, on which the economy has a constant rate…
It has long been argued that neural networks have to establish and maintain a certain intermediate level of activity in order to keep away from the regimes of chaos and silence. Strong evidence for criticality has been observed in terms of…
Recent investigations have provided important insights into the complex structure and dynamics of collectively moving flocks of living organisms. Two intriguing observations are, scale-free correlations in the velocity fluctuations, in the…
Explaining biodiversity in nature is a fundamental problem in ecology. An outstanding challenge is embodied in the so-called Competitive Exclusion Principle: two species competing for one limiting resource cannot coexist at constant…
It has long been hypothesized that operating close to the critical state is beneficial for natural and artificial systems. We test this hypothesis by evolving foraging agents controlled by neural networks that can change the system's…
We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…
Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…
Complex change is often described as "evolutionary" in economics, policy, and technology, yet most system dynamics models remain constrained to fixed state spaces and equilibrium-seeking behavior. This paper argues that evolutionary…
A model for large-scale evolution recently introduced by Amaral and Meyer is studied analytically and numerically. Species are located at different trophic levels and become extinct if their prey becomes extinct. It is proved that this…
Explaining biodiversity is a fundamental issue in ecology. A long-standing puzzle lies in the paradox of the plankton: many species of plankton feeding on a limited variety of resources coexist, apparently flouting the competitive exclusion…
We use a generalised version of the individual-based Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology to study the relationship between ecosystem structure and evolutionary history. Our evolved model ecosystems typically exhibit interaction…
This article gives a brief introduction to the mathematical modeling of large-scale biological evolution and extinction. We give three examples of simple models in this field: the coevolutionary avalanche model of Bak and Sneppen, the…
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"…
At the heart of many contemporary theories of life is the concept of biological self-organisation: organisms have to continuously produce and maintain the conditions of their own existence in order to stay alive. The way in which these…
If evolution can be connected to the principle of least action, and if it is depicted in evolution space versus time then it corresponds to the direction of ultimate causation. As an organism evolves and follows a path of proximate…
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…
A system made up of N interacting species is considered. Self-reaction terms are assumed of the logistic type. Pairwise interactions take place among species according to different modalities, thus yielding a complex asymmetric disordered…
The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…
The concept of (auto)catalytic systems has become a cornerstone in understanding evolutionary processes in various fields. The common ground is the observation that for the production of new species/goods/ideas/elements etc. the…