Related papers: Speciational view of macroevolution: are micro and…
Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…
We introduce a model for the evolution of species triggered by generation of novel features and exhaustive combination with other available traits. Under the assumption that innovations are rare, we obtain a bursty branching process of…
Understanding the emergence of biodiversity patterns in nature is a central problem in biology. Theoretical models of speciation have addressed this question in the macroecological scale, but little has been investigated in the…
A biologically motivated individual-based framework for evolution in network-structured populations is developed that can accommodate eco-evolutionary dynamics. This framework is used to construct a network birth and death model. The…
We argue that the stochastic dynamics of interacting agents which replicate, mutate and die constitutes a non-equilibrium physical process akin to aging in complex materials. Specifically, our study uses extensive computer simulations of…
We study a model of a multi-species ecosystem described by Lotka-Volterra-like equations. Interactions among species form a network whose evolution is determined by the dynamics of the model. Numerical simulations show power-law…
The central goal of a dynamical theory of evolution is to abstract the mean evolutionary trajectory in the trait space by considering ecological processes at the level of the individual. In this work, we develop such a theory for a new…
We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…
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…
The modelling of evolutionary game dynamics in finite populations requires microscopic processes that determine how strategies spread. The exact details of these processes are often chosen without much further consideration. Different types…
The origin of diversification and coexistence of genes and species have been traditionally studied in isolated biological levels. Ecological and evolutionary views have focused on the mechanisms that enable or constrain species coexistence,…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
We show that the Tangled Nature model can be interpreted as a general formulation of the quasi-species model by Eigen et al. in a frequency dependent fitness landscape. We present a detailed theoretical derivation of the mutation threshold,…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
Introducing the effect of extinction into the so-called replicator equations in mathematical biology, we construct a general model of ecosystems. The present model shows mass extinction by its own extinction dynamics when the system…
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…
Forward-time models of diversification (i.e., speciation and extinction) produce phylogenetic trees that grow "vertically" as time goes by. Pruning the extinct lineages out of such trees leads to natural models for reconstructed trees…
Understanding the time evolution of fragmented animal populations and their habitats, connected by migration, is a problem of both theoretical and practical interest. This paper presents a method for calculating the time evolution of the…
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…
Here we postulate three laws which form a mathematical framework to capture the essence of Darwinian evolutionary dynamics. The second law is most quantitative and is explicitly expressed by a unique form of stochastic differential…