This volume contains pedagogical and elementary introductions to genetics for mathematicians and physicists as well as to mathematical models and techniques of population dynamics. It also offers a physicist's perspective on modeling biological processes.

Each chapter starts with an overview followed by the recent results obtained by authors. Lectures are self-contained and are devoted to various phenomena such as the evolution of the genetic code and genomes, age-structured populations, demography, sympatric speciation, the Penna model, Lotka-Volterra and other predator-prey models, evolutionary models of ecosystems, extinctions of species, and the origin and development of language. Authors analyze their models from the computational and mathematical points of view.

Contents:

• Preface
• To Understand Nature Computer Modeling Between Genetics and Evolution
• Evolution of the Age-Structured Populations and Demography
• Darwinian Purifying Selection versus Complementing Strategy in Monte-Carlo Simulations
• Models of Population Dynamics and Their Applications in Genetics
• Computational Modeling of Evolution: Ecosystems and Language
• Age-Structured Population Models with Genetics