Happy 2018! With 2017 finally behind us, TheEGG enters its 8th calendar year. This past year has been a slow one for the blog, with only 10 new articles and two posts cataloguing 2016 (on cancer and on more theoretical aspects of evolution and general modelling). Half the months were barren: I posted nothing in March, April, May, July, August, September; and only October and November saw more than one post. But those two months…

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Over the years of TheEGG, I’ve chronicled a number of nice properties of the replicator equation and its wide range of applications. From a theoretical perspective, I showed how the differential version can serve as the generator for the action that is the finite difference version of replicator dynamics. And how measurements of replicator dynamics can correspond to log-odds. From an application perspective, I talked about how replicator dynamics can be realized in many different…

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Greetings, Theory, Evolution and Games Group! It’s a pleasure to be on the other side of the keyboard today. Many thanks to Artem for the invite to write about some of our recent work and the opportunity to introduce myself via this post. I do a bit of blogging of my own over at vcannataro.com — mostly about neat science I stumble over while figuring out my way. I’m a biologist. I study the evolutionary…

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In Artem’s previous post about the IMO workshop he suggests that “[s]ince we are forced to move from the genetic to the epigenetic level of description, it becomes important to suggest a plausible mechanism for heritable epigenetic effects. We need to find a stochastic ratcheted phenotypic switch among the pathways of the CMML cells.” Here I’ll go into more detail about modeling this ratcheting and how to go about identifying the mechanism. We can think…

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For those of us attending the 7th annual Integrated Mathematical Oncology workshop (IMO7) at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, this week was a gruelling yet exciting set of four near-all-nighters. Participants were grouped into five teams and were tasked with coming up with a new model to elucidate a facet of a particular type of cancer. With $50k on the line and enthusiasm for creating evolutionary models, Team Orange (the wonderful team I had…

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In my views of game theory, I largely follow Ariel Rubinstein: game theory is a set of fables. A collection of heuristic models that helps us structure how we make sense of and communicate about the world. Evolutionary game theory was born of classic game theory theory through a series of analogies. These analogies are either generalizations or restrictions of the theory depending on if you’re thinking about the stories or the mathematics. Given this…

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It was Friday — two in the morning. And I was busy fine-tuning a model in Mathematica and editing slides for our presentation. My team and I had been running on coffee and snacks all week. Most of us had met each other for the first time on Monday, got an inkling of the problem space we’d be working on, brainstormed, and hacked together a number of equations and a few chunks of code to…

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While November 2016 might be remembered for the inauspicious political upset likely to leave future historians as confused as we are, a more positive event transpired in tandem – the 6th Integrated Mathematical Oncology (IMO) Workshop. I was honoured to take part as a member of Team Orange, where we were tasked with investigating the emergence of treatment resistance in CMML. Unlike many other cancers where the evolution of resistance to treatment is well understood,…

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