Related papers: A Selective Advantage for Conservative Viruses
In environments that vary frequently and unpredictably, bet-hedgers can overtake the population. Diversifying bet-hedgers have a diverse set of offspring so that, no matter the conditions they find themselves in, at least some offspring…
The immune system is a highly parallel and distributed intelligent system which has learning, memory, and associative capabilities. Artificial Immune System is an evolutionary paradigm inspired by the biological aspects of the immune system…
The amplification cycle of many replicators (natural or artificial) involves the usage of a host compartment, inside of which the replicator express phenotypic compounds necessary to carry out its genetic replication. For example, viruses…
In subdivided populations, migration acts together with selection and genetic drift and determines their evolution. Building up on a recently proposed method, which hinges on the emergence of a time scale separation between local and global…
Neutral landscapes and mutational robustness are believed to be important enablers of evolvability in biology. We apply these concepts to software, defining mutational robustness to be the fraction of random mutations that leave a program's…
We analyze the advantage of cell size control strategies in growing populations under mortality constraints. We demonstrate a general advantage of the adder control strategy in the presence of growth-dependent mortality, and for different…
Population dynamics and evolutionary genetics underly the structure of ecosystems, changing on the same timescale for interacting species with rapid turnover, such as virus (e.g. HIV) and immune response. Thus, an important problem in…
Current discrete randomness and information conservation inequalities are over total recursive functions, i.e. restricted to deterministic processing. This restriction implies that an algorithm can break algorithmic randomness conservation…
Reputed intractable, the question of the origin of viruses has long been neglected. In the modern literature 'Virus evolution' has come to refer to study more akin to population genetics, such as the world-wide scrutiny on new polymorphisms…
Well known biological approximations are universal, i.e. invariant to transformations from one species to another. With no other experimental data, such invariance yields exact conservation (with respect to biological diversity and…
We study a stochastic spatial model of biological competition in which two species have the same birth and death rates, but different diffusion constants. In the absence of this difference, the model can be considered as an off-lattice…
The ability to absorb mutations while retaining structure and function, or mutational robustness, is a remarkable property of natural proteins. In this Letter, we use a computational model of organismic evolution [Zeldovich et al, PLOS Comp…
Why, contrary to theoretical predictions, do marine microbe communities harbor tremendous phenotypic heterogeneity? How can so many marine microbe species competing in the same niche coexist? We discovered a unifying explanation for both…
We consider the evolution of populations under the joint action of mutation and differential reproduction, or selection. The population is modelled as a finite-type Markov branching process in continuous time, and the associated…
The role of historical contingency in the origin of life is one of the great unknowns in modern science. Only one example of life exists--one that proceeded from a single self-replicating organism (or a set of replicating hyper-cycles) to…
In this work, we study the problem of clustering survival data $-$ a challenging and so far under-explored task. We introduce a novel semi-supervised probabilistic approach to cluster survival data by leveraging recent advances in…
As part of a generalized "prisoners' dilemma", is considered that the evolution of a population with a full set of behavioral strategies limited only by the depth of memory. Each subsequent generation of the population successively loses…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
Under constant selection, each trait has a fixed fitness, and small mutation rates allow populations to efficiently exploit the optimal trait. Therefore it is reasonable to expect mutation rates will evolve downwards. However, we find this…
RNA viruses exist in large intra-host populations which display great genotypic and phenotypic diversity. We analyze a model of viral competition between two different viral strains infecting a constantly replenished cell pool, in which we…