Related papers: Collective evolution and the genetic code
Nature provides us with abundant examples of how large numbers of individuals can make decisions without the coordination of a central authority. Social insects, birds, fishes, and many other living collectives, rely on simple interaction…
The environment has a strong influence on a population's evolutionary dynamics. Driven by both intrinsic and external factors, the environment is subject to continual change in nature. To capture an ever-changing environment, we consider a…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
Combinatorial evolution - the creation of new things through the combination of existing things - can be a powerful way to evolve rather than design technical objects such as electronic circuits. Intriguingly, this seems to be an ongoing…
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
Programming languages are engineered languages that allow to instruct a machine and share algorithmic information; they have a great influence on the society since they underlie almost every information technology artefact, and they are at…
Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…
Cooperative behaviors are deeply embedded in structured biological and social systems. Networks are often employed to portray pairwise interactions among individuals, where network nodes represent individuals and links indicate who…
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…
Biological systems like long-lived clonal organisms, holobionts and clades challenge traditional evolutionary thinking since they adapt without populations or reproduction. This paper aims to provide an overarching theoretical framework…
The purpose of this roadmap article is to draw attention to a paradigm shift in our understanding of evolution towards a perspective of ecological-evolutionary feedback, highlighted through two recent highly simplified examples of rapid…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
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…
Why is the genetic code the way it is? The most successful theory states that the codon assignments minimise the effects of errors arising in primordial living systems. Here a transversion is reported that leaves invariant degeneracy in the…
In this article we focus on evolving information systems. First a delimitation of the concept of evolution is provided, resulting in a first attempt to a general theory for such evolutions. The theory makes a distinction between the…
Evolutionary processes proved very useful for solving optimization problems. In this work, we build a formalization of the notion of cooperation and competition of multiple systems working toward a common optimization goal of the population…
The mutual influence of dynamics and structure is a central issue in complex systems. In this paper we study by simulation slow evolution of network under the feedback of a local-majority-rule opinion process. If performance-enhancing local…
Community structure is pervasive in various real-world networks, portraying the strong local clustering of nodes. Unveiling the community structure of a network is deemed to a crucial step towards understanding the dynamics on the network.…
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…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…