Evan Large with Harsh Mathur

Models of Biological Evolution

Many complex natural systems are believed to evolve into a non-equilibrium critical state, following which the system experiences change through drastic non-gradual events.  The original Darwinian view of biological evolution was that change happened gradually over the course of time. More recently, Gould and Eldridge have depicted biological evolution as periods of relative tranquility between occasional bursts of activity.  The extinction of species can be seen as another self-organizing critical system, and can be modeled as such

    In this project, biological evolution will be studied by a combination of numerical and analytical techniques and by analogy to models studied in statistical mechanics.