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Theories and models

Section edited by Laura Kubatko and Arne Traulsen

This section considers studies in mathematical modeling of evolutionary processes and research into theoretical areas.

Page 1 of 2

  1. Biological evolution exhibits an extraordinary capability to adapt organisms to their environments. The explanation for this often takes for granted that random genetic variation produces at least some benefic...

    Authors: Miguel Brun-Usan, Alfredo Rago, Christoph Thies, Tobias Uller and Richard A. Watson
    Citation: BMC Ecology and Evolution 2021 21:205
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  2. Plant communities of fragmented agricultural landscapes, are subject to patch isolation and scale-dependent effects. Variation in configuration, composition, and distance from one another affect biological pro...

    Authors: Michael McLeish, Adrián Peláez, Israel Pagán, Rosario Gavilán, Aurora Fraile and Fernando García-Arenal
    Citation: BMC Ecology and Evolution 2021 21:173
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  3. Synthetic gene drive technologies aim to spread transgenic constructs into wild populations even when they impose organismal fitness disadvantages. The extraordinary diversity of plausible drive mechanisms and...

    Authors: Prateek Verma, R. Guy Reeves and Chaitanya S. Gokhale
    Citation: BMC Ecology and Evolution 2021 21:156
    Content type: Research article Published on:

    The Correction to this article has been published in BMC Ecology and Evolution 2021 21:195

  5. The Euphorbia hypothesis on the origin of fairy circles (FCs) in Namibia dates back to 1979. It proposes that the remains of decaying shrubs would induce an allelopathic interaction with the grasses and thereb...

    Authors: Stephan Getzin, Ailly Nambwandja, Sönke Holch and Kerstin Wiegand
    Citation: BMC Ecology and Evolution 2021 21:102
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  6. The pace of aging varies considerably in nature. The best-known explanation of the evolution of specific rates of aging is the Williams’ hypothesis suggesting that the aging rate should correlate with the leve...

    Authors: Peter Lenart, Julie Bienertová-Vašků and Luděk Berec
    Citation: BMC Ecology and Evolution 2021 21:87
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  8. Recovering the historical patterns of selection acting on a protein coding sequence is a major goal of evolutionary biology. Mutation-selection models address this problem by explicitly modelling fixation rate...

    Authors: Andrew M. Ritchie, Tristan L. Stark and David A. Liberles
    Citation: BMC Ecology and Evolution 2021 21:39
    Content type: Methodology article Published on:

  9. One of the dangers of global climate change to wildlife is distorting sex ratios by temperature-induced sex reversals in populations where sex determination is not exclusively genetic, potentially leading to p...

    Authors: Edina Nemesházi, Szilvia Kövér and Veronika Bókony
    Citation: BMC Ecology and Evolution 2021 21:16
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  10. Honeybees have extraordinary phenotypic plasticity in their senescence rate, making them a fascinating model system for the evolution of aging. Seasonal variation in senescence and extrinsic mortality results ...

    Authors: Natalie J. Lemanski, Siddhant Bansal and Nina H. Fefferman
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2020 20:139
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  11. Tumors are widely recognized to progress through clonal evolution by sequentially acquiring selectively advantageous genetic alterations that significantly contribute to tumorigenesis and thus are termned driv...

    Authors: Patrick Grossmann, Simona Cristea and Niko Beerenwinkel
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2020 20:89
    Content type: Methodology article Published on:

  13. We hypothesize prebiotic evolution of self-replicating macro-molecules (Alberts, Molecular biology of the cell, 2015; Orgel, Crit Rev Biochem Mol Biol 39:99-123, 2004; Hud, Nat Commun 9:5171) favoured the cons...

    Authors: Hemachander Subramanian, Joel Brown and Robert Gatenby
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2020 20:75
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  14. Individuals consistently differ in behaviour, exhibiting so-called personalities. In many species, individuals differ also in their cognitive abilities. When personalities and cognitive abilities occur in dist...

    Authors: Jannis Liedtke and Lutz Fromhage
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2019 19:234
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  15. Mutators are common in bacterial populations, both in natural isolates and in the lab. The fate of these lineages, which mutation rate is increased up to 100 ×, has long been studied using population genetics ...

    Authors: Jacob Pieter Rutten, Paulien Hogeweg and Guillaume Beslon
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2019 19:191
    Content type: Research Article Published on:

  16. Organisms are expected to respond to changing environmental conditions through local adaptation, range shift or local extinction. The process of local adaptation can occur by genetic changes or phenotypic plas...

    Authors: Daniel Romero-Mujalli, Florian Jeltsch and Ralph Tiedemann
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2019 19:175
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  17. The evolution of multi-cellular animals has produced a conspicuous trend toward increased body size. This trend has introduced at least two novel problems: an expected elevated risk of somatic disorders, such ...

    Authors: Andrii Rozhok and James DeGregori
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2019 19:172
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  18. For the understanding of human nature, the evolutionary roots of human moral behaviour are a key precondition. Our question is as follows: Can the altruistic moral rule “Risk your life to save your family memb...

    Authors: József Garay, Barnabás M. Garay, Zoltán Varga, Villő Csiszár and Tamás F. Móri
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2019 19:147
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  19. Local adaptation of marine and diadromous species is thought to be a product of larval dispersal, settlement mortality, and differential reproductive success, particularly in heterogeneous post-settlement habi...

    Authors: Kristine N. Moody, Johanna L. K. Wren, Donald R. Kobayashi, Michael J. Blum, Margaret B. Ptacek, Richard W. Blob, Robert J. Toonen, Heiko L. Schoenfuss and Michael J. Childress
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2019 19:88
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  21. An excess of nonsynonymous substitutions, over neutrality, is considered evidence of positive Darwinian selection. Inference for proteins often relies on estimation of the nonsynonymous to synonymous ratio (ω = d

    Authors: Katherine A. Dunn, Toby Kenney, Hong Gu and Joseph P. Bielawski
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2019 19:22
    Content type: Methodology article Published on:

  22. A strong variability in cancer incidence is observed between human organs. Recently, it has been suggested that the relative contribution of organs to organism fitness (reproduction or survival) could explain ...

    Authors: Cindy Gidoin, Beata Ujvari, Frédéric Thomas and Benjamin Roche
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:185
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  23. Following recent advances in bioimaging, high-resolution 3D models of biological structures are now generated rapidly and at low-cost. To use this data to address evolutionary and ecological questions, an arra...

    Authors: James D. Gardiner, Julia Behnsen and Charlotte A. Brassey
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:184
    Content type: Methodology article Published on:

  24. Macroevolutionary modeling of species diversification plays important roles in inferring large-scale biodiversity patterns. It allows estimation of speciation and extinction rates and statistically testing the...

    Authors: Jingchun Li, Jen-Pen Huang, Jeet Sukumaran and L. Lacey Knowles
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:123
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  25. Phylogenetic comparative methods allow us to test evolutionary hypotheses without the benefit of an extensive fossil record. These methods, however, make simplifying assumptions, among them that clades are alw...

    Authors: Andrew G. Simpson, Peter J. Wagner, Scott L. Wing and Charles B. Fenster
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2018 18:69
    Content type: Methodology article Published on:

  28. Recently, important discoveries regarding the archaeon that functioned as the “host” in the merger with a bacterium that led to the eukaryotes, its “complex” nature, and its phylogenetic relationship to eukary...

    Authors: P.T.S. van der Gulik, W.D. Hoff and D. Speijer
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:218
    Content type: Review Published on:

  29. Estimating the variability in isolation times across co-distributed taxon pairs that may have experienced the same allopatric isolating mechanism is a core goal of comparative phylogeography. The use of hierar...

    Authors: Isaac Overcast, Justin C. Bagley and Michael J. Hickerson
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:203
    Content type: Methodology article Published on:

  31. B4galnt2 is a blood group-related glycosyltransferase that displays cis-regulatory variation for its tissue-specific expression patterns in house mice. The wild type allele, found e.g....

    Authors: Marie Vallier, Maria Abou Chakra, Laura Hindersin, Miriam Linnenbrink, Arne Traulsen and John F. Baines
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:187
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  32. Hundreds of herbarium collections have accumulated a valuable heritage and knowledge of plants over several centuries. Recent initiatives started ambitious preservation plans to digitize this information and m...

    Authors: Jose Carranza-Rojas, Herve Goeau, Pierre Bonnet, Erick Mata-Montero and Alexis Joly
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:181
    Content type: Research Article Published on:

  35. Over the last 300 years, interactions between alewives and zooplankton communities in several lakes in the U.S. have caused the alewives’ morphology to transition rapidly from anadromous to landlocked. Lakes w...

    Authors: Jung koo Kang and Xavier Thibert-Plante
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:58
    Content type: Research Article Published on:

  37. Blindness has evolved repeatedly in cave-dwelling organisms, and many hypotheses have been proposed to explain this observation, including both accumulation of neutral loss-of-function mutations and adaptation...

    Authors: Reed A. Cartwright, Rachel S. Schwartz, Alexandra L. Merry and Megan M. Howell
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:45
    Content type: Research Article Published on:

  38. Gene duplication has been identified as a key process driving functional change in many genomes. Several biological models exist for the evolution of a pair of duplicates after a duplication event, and it is b...

    Authors: Tristan L. Stark, David A. Liberles, Barbara R. Holland and Małgorzata M. O’Reilly
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2017 17:38
    Content type: Research Article Published on:

  41. Colour polymorphic species provide invaluable insight into processes that generate and maintain intra-specific variation. Despite an increasing understanding of the genetic basis of discrete morphs, sources of...

    Authors: Katrina J. Rankin, Claire A. McLean, Darrell J. Kemp and Devi Stuart-Fox
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:179
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  42. Social learning is potentially advantageous, but evolutionary theory predicts that (i) its benefits may be self-limiting because social learning can lead to information parasitism, and (ii) these limitations c...

    Authors: Daniel J. van der Post, Mathias Franz and Kevin N. Laland
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:166
    Content type: Research Article Published on:

  43. Human influenza virus A/H3N2 undergoes rapid adaptive evolution in response to host immunity. Positively selected amino acid substitutions have been detected mainly in the hemagglutinin (HA) segment. The genea...

    Authors: Kangchon Kim and Yuseob Kim
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:156
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  45. Organisms have evolved a variety of defence mechanisms against natural enemies, which are typically used at the expense of other life history components. Induced defence mechanisms impose minor costs when path...

    Authors: Tsukushi Kamiya, Leonardo Oña, Bregje Wertheim and G. Sander van Doorn
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:92
    Content type: Research Article Published on:

  46. Mixed dispersal syndromes have historically been regarded as a bet-hedging mechanism that enhances survivorship in unpredictable environments, ensuring that some propagules stay in the maternal environment whi...

    Authors: Jorge Hidalgo, Rafael Rubio de Casas and Miguel Á.Muñoz
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:71
    Content type: Research Article Published on:

  47. Darwin and the architects of the Modern Synthesis found sympatric speciation difficult to explain and suggested it is unlikely to occur. Increasingly, evidence over the past few decades suggest that sympatric ...

    Authors: Wayne M. Getz, Richard Salter, Dana Paige Seidel and Pim van Hooft
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:50
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  48. Dosage balance has been described as an important process for the retention of duplicate genes after whole genome duplication events. However, dosage balance is only a temporary mechanism for duplicate gene re...

    Authors: Ashley I. Teufel, Liang Liu and David A. Liberles
    Citation: BMC Evolutionary Biology 2016 16:45
    Content type: Research article Published on:
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