Related papers: A physical model for competition between biologica…
Dispersal is an important strategy that allows organisms to locate and exploit favorable habitats. The question arises: given competition in a spatially heterogeneous landscape, what is the optimal rate of dispersal? Continuous population…
Current-day genomes bear the mark of the evolutionary processes. One of the strongest indications is the sequence homology among families of proteins that perform similar biological functions in different species. The number of proteins in…
We study the evolution of recombination using a microscopic model developed within the frame of the theory of quantitative traits. Two components of fitness are considered: a static one that describes adaptation to environmental factors not…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
Winner-take-all phenomena are observed in various competitive systems. We find similar phenomena in replicator models with randomly fluctuating growth rates. The disparity between winners and losers increases indefinitely, even if all…
Competitive birth-death processes often exhibit an oscillatory behavior. We investigate a particular case where the oscillation cycles are marginally stable on the mean-field level. An iconic example of such a system is the Lotka-Volterra…
We propose a model for evolution aiming to reproduce statistical features of fossil data, in particular the distributions of extinction events, the distribution of species per genus and the distribution of lifetimes, all of which are known…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
Stochastic models, based on random processes, may lead to power law distributions, which provide long range correlations. The observation of power law behavior and the presence of long range correlations in biological systems has been…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Using data drawn from large-scale databases, a number of interesting trends in the fossil record have been observed in recent years. These include the average decline in extinction rates throughout the Phanerozoic, the average increase in…
Mathematical models of population extinction have a variety of applications in such areas as ecology, paleontology and conservation biology. Here we propose and investigate two types of sub-exponential models of population extinction.The…
Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…
A microscopic agent dynamical model for diploid age-structured populations is used to study evolution of polymorphism and sympatric speciation. The underlying ecology is represented by a unimodal distribution of resources of some width.…
There has been some confusion concerning the animal group-size: an exponential distribution was deduced by maximizing the entropy; lognormal distributions were practically used; a power-law decay with exponent {3/2} was proposed in physical…
We present an explicit unified stochastic model of fluctuations in population size due to random birth, death, density-dependent competition and environmental fluctuations. Stochastic dynamics provide insight into small populations,…
Regardless of a system's complexity or scale, its growth can be considered to be a spontaneous thermodynamic response to a local convergence of down-gradient material flows. Here it is shown how growth can be constrained to a few distinct…
This paper investigates the competition of two species in a heterogeneous environment subject to the effect of harvesting. The most realistic harvesting case is connected with the intrinsic growth rate, and the harvesting functions are…
We analyze the geometry of the species- and genotype-size distribution in evolving and adapting populations of single-stranded self-replicating genomes: here programs in the Avida world. We find that a scale-free distribution (power law)…