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Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…
Oscillations are observed in all branches of science and culture, ranging from the behavior of ele-mentary particles, atoms, molecules in simple chemical or physical systems or even in complex organisms, up to oscillations of the behavior…
Innovation is a key ingredient for the evolution of several systems, including social and biological ones. Focused investigations and lateral thinking may lead to innovation, as well as serendipity and other random discovery processes. Some…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
Complex systems show the capacity to aggregate information and to display coordinated activity. In the case of social systems the interaction of different individuals leads to the emergence of norms, trends in political positions, opinions,…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Success-driven social learning, in which individuals preferentially adopt the ideas and methods that appear most successful, is a foundational principle of collective behavior across systems ranging from ant colonies to scientific…
Recently it has been demonstrated that causal entropic forces can lead to the emergence of complex phenomena associated with human cognitive niche such as tool use and social cooperation. Here I show that even more fundamental traits…
Indirect reciprocity is a key explanation for the exceptional magnitude of cooperation among humans. This literature suggests that a large proportion of human cooperation is driven by social norms and individuals' incentives to maintain a…
Cooperation or defection and participation or withdrawal are well-known options of behavior in game-like activities in free societies, yet the co-evolutionary dynamics of these behavioral traits in the individual level are not well…
Breakthrough discoveries and inventions involve unexpected combinations of contents including problems, methods, and natural entities, and also diverse contexts such as journals, subfields, and conferences. Drawing on data from tens of…
The process of doing Science in condition of uncertainty is illustrated with a toy experiment in which the inferential and the forecasting aspects are both present. The fundamental aspects of probabilistic reasoning, also relevant in real…
Societal complexity may be at a historical peak. Distinct from entropy, complexity tends to rise as systems move away from order, crest at an intermediate state, and decline as entropy continues increasing. The use of a thermodynamic…
To analyze the evolutionary emergence of structural complexity in physical processes we introduce a general, but tractable, model of objects that interact to produce new objects. Since the objects--\emph{$epsilon$-machines}--have well…
The primordial confrontation underlying the existence of our universe can be conceived as the battle between entropy and complexity. The law of ever-increasing entropy (Boltzmann H-theorem) evokes an irreversible, one-directional evolution…
A major challenge of interdisciplinary description of complex system behaviour is whether real systems of higher complexity levels can be understood with at least the same degree of objective, "scientific" rigour and universality as…
Decades of scientific inquiry have sought to understand how evolution fosters cooperation, a concept seemingly at odds with the belief that evolution should produce rational, self-interested individuals. Most previous work has focused on…
Novelties are part of our daily lives. We constantly adopt new technologies, conceive new ideas, meet new people, experiment with new situations. Occasionally, we as individuals, in a complicated cognitive and sometimes fortuitous process,…
We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do…