Related papers: Why humans die -- an unsolved biological problem
Living systems are typically characterized by irreversible processes. A condition equivalent to the reversibility is the detailed balance, whose absence is an obstacle for analytically solving ecological models. We revisit a promising model…
Population extinction is a rare event which requires overcoming an effective barrier. We show that the extinction rate can be fragile: a small change in the system parameters leads to an exponentially strong change of the rate, with the…
The notion that natural disasters can be controlled is, of course, farcical; history is permeated with examples of countless failed attempts at this pointless task; it is synonymous with trying to build a perpetual motion machine.…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
The adaptation rate in theoretical models of biological evolution increases with the mutation rate but only to a point when mutations into lethal states cause extinction. One would expect that removing such states should be beneficial for…
Weak selection, which means a phenotype is slightly advantageous over another, is an important limiting case in evolutionary biology. Recently it has been introduced into evolutionary game theory. In evolutionary game dynamics, the…
Evolutionary games are a developing sub-field of game theory. This branch of game theory is used in the study of the adaptation of large, but finite, populations of agents to changes in the environment. It assumes that each agent has no…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
A phenomenological theory of growth of the population of humankind is proposed. The theory based on the assumption about a multifractal nature of the set of number of people in temporal axis and contains control parameters. In particular…
Evolutionary game theory is a successful mathematical framework geared towards understanding the selective pressures that affect the evolution of the strategies of agents engaged in interactions with potential conflicts. While a…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
In an attempt to explain the uniqueness of the coding mechanism of living cells as contrasted with multi-species structure of ecosystems we examine two models of individuals with some replicative properties. In the first model the system…
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…
Many socio-economic and biological processes can be modeled as systems of interacting individuals. The behaviour of such systems can be often described within game-theoretic models. In these lecture notes, we introduce fundamental concepts…
Sex is considered as an evolutionary paradox, since its evolutionary advantage does not necessarily overcome the two fold cost of sharing half of one's offspring's genome with another member of the population. Here we demonstrate that…
A list of open problems on global behavior in time of some evolution systems, mainly governed by P.D.E, is given together with some background information explaining the context in which these problems appeared. The common characteristic of…
If human societies are so complex, then how can we hope to understand them? Artificial Life gives us one answer. The field of Artificial Life comprises a diverse set of introspective studies that largely ask the same questions, albeit from…
This paper motivates the study of decision theory as necessary for aligning smarter-than-human artificial systems with human interests. We discuss the shortcomings of two standard formulations of decision theory, and demonstrate that they…
Neural codes appear efficient. Naturally, neuroscientists contend that an efficient process is responsible for generating efficient codes. They argue that natural selection is the efficient process that generates those codes. Although…
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…