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

We use a generalised version of the individual-based Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology to study the relationship between ecosystem structure and evolutionary history. Our evolved model ecosystems typically exhibit interaction networks with exponential degree distributions and an inverse dependence between connectance and species richness. We use a simplified network evolution model to demonstrate that the observed degree distributions can occur as a consequence of ...

Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates. Individuals reproduce and die with a rate that is a property of each state, not necessarily related to its stability, and the offspring is born on the parent's state. The total population is limited by resources or space, as for example in a...

This extended abstract was presented at the Nectar Track of ECML PKDD 2024 in Vilnius, Lithuania. The content supplements a recently published paper "Laws of Macroevolutionary Expansion" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

We introduce a model of biological evolution where species evolve in response to biotic interactions and a fluctuating environmental stress. The species may either become extinct or mutate to acquire a new fitness value when the effective stress level is greater than their individual fitness. The model exhibits a phase transition to a completely extinct phase as the environmental stress or the mutation rate is varied. We discuss the generic conditions for which this transitio...

We incorporate the generic hierarchical architecture of foodwebs into a "{\it unified}" model that describes both "micro" and "macro" evolutions within a single theoretical framework. This model describes the "micro" -evolution in detail by accounting for the birth, ageing and natural death of individual organisms as well as prey-predator interactions on a hierarchical dynamic food web. It also provides a natural description of random mutations and speciation/orgination of sp...

At what level does selective pressure effectively act? When considering the reproductive dynamics of interacting and mutating agents, it has long been debated whether selection is better understood by focusing on the individual or if hierarchical selection emerges as a consequence of joint adaptation. Despite longstanding efforts in theoretical ecology there is still no consensus on this fundamental issue, most likely due to the difficulty in obtaining adequate data spanning ...

We evaluate the implication and outlook of an unanticipated simplification in the macroscopic behavior of two high-dimensional sto-chastic models: the Replicator Model with Mutations and the Tangled Nature Model (TaNa) of evolutionary ecology. This simplification consists of the apparent display of low-dimensional dynamics in the non-stationary intermittent time evolution of the model on a coarse-grained scale. Evolution on this time scale spans generations of individuals, ra...

Aging is a fundamental aspect of living systems that undergo a progressive deterioration of physiological function with age and an increase of vulnerability to disease and death. Living systems, known as complex systems, require complexity in interactions among molecules, cells, organs, and individuals or regulatory mechanisms to perform a variety of activities for survival. On this basis, aging can be understood in terms of a progressive loss of complexity with age; this sug...

We propose a new procedure to monitor and forecast the onset of transitions in high dimensional complex systems. We describe our procedure by an application to the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology. The quasi-stable configurations of the full stochastic dynamics are taken as input for a stability analysis by means of the deterministic mean field equations. Numerical analysis of the high dimensional stability matrix allows us to identify unstable directions associat...

Evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random changes (the method employed by evolution) is much more likely to be harmful than advantageous, potentially lowering the chances of reproduction of the affected individuals. The proposition of ageing as a nonadaptive phenomenon is robust and nearly universally acknowl...