Sergio Rinaldi : Analysis of Evolutionary Processes

Evolutionary Dynamics Can be Chaotic: a First Example

We present in this paper the first example of chaotic evolutionary dynamics in biology. We consider a Lotka-Volterra tritrophic food chain composed of a resource, its consumer, and a predator species, each characterized by a single adaptive phenotypic trait, and we show that for suitable modeling and parameter choices the evolutionary trajectories approach a strange attractor in the three-dimen...

Bifurcation Analysis of a Prey-Predator Coevolution Model

We show in this paper how numerical bifurcation analysis can be used to study the evolution of genetically transmitted phenotypic traits. For this, we consider the standard Rosenzweig-MacArthur prey-predator model and, following the so-called Adaptive Dynamics approach, we derive from it a second-order evolutionary model composed of two ODEs, one for the prey trait and one for the predator trai...

Developing Adaptive Differential Evolution as a New Evolutionary Algorithm, Application in Optimization of Chemical Processes

Ecological bistability and evolutionary reversals under asymmetrical competition.

How does the process of life-history evolution interplay with population dynamics? Almost all models that have addressed this question assume that any combination of phenotypic traits uniquely determine the ecological population state. Here we show that if multiple ecological equilibria can exist, the evolution of a trait that relates to competitive performance can undergo adaptive reversals th...

Chaotic Red Queen coevolution in three-species food chains.

Coevolution between two antagonistic species follows the so-called 'Red Queen dynamics' when reciprocal selection results in an endless series of adaptation by one species and counteradaptation by the other. Red Queen dynamics are 'genetically driven' when selective sweeps involving new beneficial mutations result in perpetual oscillations of the coevolving traits on the slow evolutionary time ...