The world is now facing many severe problems due to increasing global demands for already limiting food and energy resources. Plant reproduction is crucial not only for producing offspring but also for improving crop quality and yield. Moreover, plant reproduction entails complex growth and developmental processes, which offer various opportunities for elucidating fundamental principles in biol...

This paper presents simulation results of artificial foraging agent communities. The goal of each agent in the community is to find food. Once a food source is found, agents eat portions of it and carry some other portions to the nest (in a manner similar to ants) until the food is depleted. Agents may also communicate food positions when they are near each other. They are given a set of genes ...

Asexuality has major theoretical advantages over sexual reproduction. An important evolutionary puzzle, therefore, is why exclusively asexual metazoan lineages rarely endure. The Red Queen hypothesis posits that asexuality is rapidly extinguished by relentlessly coevolving parasites and pathogens. If so, any long-lasting asexual lineage must have unusual alternative mechanisms to deal with thes...

The evolutionary advantage of sexual reproduction has been considered as one of the most pressing questions in evolutionary biology. While a pluralistic view of the evolution of sex and recombination has been suggested by some, here we take a simpler view and try to quantify the conditions under which sex can evolve given a set of minimal assumptions. Since real populations are finite and also ...

I investigate the structure of an argument that culture cannot be maintained in a population if each individual acquires a given cultural variant from a single person. I note two puzzling consequences of the argument: It appears to conflict with (a) many models of cultural transmission and (b) real-world cases of cultural transmission. I resolve the first puzzle by showing that one of the model...

The evolutionary significance of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination is a long-standing puzzle. Some recent experiments on Drosophila show that a lack of recombination can impede adaptive evolution.

The increasing evidence of coexistence of cryptic species with no recognized niche differentiation has called attention to mechanisms reducing competition that are not based on niche-differentiation. Only sex-based mechanisms have been shown to create the negative feedback needed for stable coexistence of competitors with completely overlapping niches. Here we show that density-dependent sexual...

First I think one good way to look at the cloning issue,1 is to remember what Descartes asked you to imagine: a different sort of world, though not one in which an evil genius is running things or you are only dreaming.2 Rather, imagine you are under a massive delusion about the way in which you were actually produced. Everything about you remains as you are now, except that you are not the pro...

Why sexual reproduction has evolved to be such a widespread mode of reproduction remains a major question in evolutionary biology. Although previous studies have shown that increased sex and recombination can evolve in the presence of host-parasite interactions (the 'Red Queen hypothesis' for sex), many of these studies have assumed that multiple loci mediate infection vs. resistance. Data sugg...