The fate of cooperation during range expansions

Cooperation is beneficial for the species as a whole, but, at the level of an individual, defection pays off. Natural selection is then expected to favor defectors and eliminate cooperation. This prediction is in stark contrast with the abundance of cooperation at all levels of biological systems: from cells cooperating to form a biofilm or an organism to ecosystems and human societies. Several explanations have been proposed to resolve this paradox, including direct reciprocity, kin, and group selection. However, our work builds upon an observation that selection on cooperators might depend both on their relative frequency in the population and on the population density. We find that this feedback between the population and evolutionary dynamics can substantially increase the frequency of cooperators at the front of an expanding population, and can even lead to a splitting of cooperators from defectors. After splitting, only cooperators colonize new territories, while defectors slowly invade them from behind. Since range expansions are very common in nature, our work provides a new explanation of the maintenance of cooperation

On the large values of the Riemann zeta-function on short segments of the critical line

In this paper, we obtain a series of new conditional lower bounds for the modulus and the argument of the Riemann zeta function on very short segments of the critical line, based on the Riemann hypothesis. In particular, the conditional solution of one problem of A.A.Karatsuba is given. Some typos of the previous versions are corrected (in particular, the important remark of Prof. Yan Fyodorov is taken into account). The reference to the grant of Russian Scientific Fund is also added.Comment: 40 pages, 4 figure

Quantum Hypercomputation - Hype or Computation?

A recent attempt to compute a (recursion--theoretic) non--computable function using the quantum adiabatic algorithm is criticized and found wanting. Quantum algorithms may outperform classical algorithms in some cases, but so far they retain the classical (recursion--theoretic) notion of computability. A speculation is then offered as to where the putative power of quantum computers may come from