Aging and species abundance in the Tangled Nature model of biological evolution

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, consistent with the simulation results, that provides a valuable insight into how the microscopic dynamics of the model determine the observed macroscopic phenomena published previously. The dynamics of the Tangled Nature model is defined ...

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 the Tangled Nature Model (TNM) of biological evolution to show that punctuated equilibria successively generated by the model's dynamics have increasing entropy and are separated by increasing entropic barriers. We further show that these sta...

The Tangled Nature Model of biological and cultural evolution features interacting agents which compete for limited resources and reproduce in an error prone fashion and at a rate depending on the `tangle' of interactions they maintain with others. The set of interactions linking a TNM individual to others is key to its reproductive success and arguably constitutes its most important property. Yet, in many studies, the interactions of an individual and those of its mutated ...

We discuss a simple model of co-evolution. In order to emphasise the effect of interaction between individuals the entire population is subjected to the same physical environment. Species are emergent structures and extinction, origination and diversity are entirely a consequence of co-evolutionary interaction between individuals. For comparison we consider both asexual and sexually reproducing populations. We also study competition between asexual and sexual reproduction in ...

We study the Tangled Nature model of macro evolution and demonstrate that the co-evolutionary dynamics produces an increasingly correlated core of well occupied types. At the same time the entire configuration of types becomes increasing de-correlated. This finding is related to ecosystem evolution. The systems level dynamics of the model is subordinated to intermittent transitions between meta-stable states. We improve on previous studies of the statistics of the transition ...

We present a model for evolution and extinction in large ecosystems. The model incorporates the effects of interactions between species and the influences of abiotic environmental factors. We study the properties of the model by approximate analytic solution and also by numerical simulation, and use it to make predictions about the distribution of extinctions and species lifetimes that we would expect to see in real ecosystems. It should be possible to test these predictions ...

It is well known that low-dimensional nonlinear deterministic maps close to a tangent bifurcation exhibit intermittency and this circumstance has been exploited, e.g. by Procaccia and Schuster [Phys. Rev. A 28, 1210 (1983)], to develop a general theory of 1/f spectra. This suggests it is interesting to study the extent to which the behavior of a high-dimensional stochastic system can be described by such tangent maps. The Tangled Nature (TaNa) Model of evolutionary ecology is...

Understanding systems level behaviour of many interacting agents is challenging in various ways, here we'll focus on the how the interaction between components can lead to hierarchical structures with different types of dynamics, or causations, at different levels. We use the Tangled Nature model to discuss the co-evolutionary aspects connecting the microscopic level of the individual to the macroscopic systems level. At the microscopic level the individual agent may undergo ...

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 class of deterministic individual based models describing individual births and deaths, which captures the essential features of standard stochastic individual-based models and become identical with the latter under maximal competition. The key...

We study a version of the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology redefined in a phenotype space where mutants have properties correlated to their parents. The model has individual-based dynamics whilst incorporating species scale competitive constraints and a system scale resource constraint. Multiple species arise that coexist in a species interaction network with evolving global properties. Both the mean interaction strength and the network connectance increase relati...