Related papers: The Nonequilibrium Nature of Culinary Evolution

Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…

Regulators and academics are increasingly interested in the causal effect that algorithmic actions of a digital platform have on consumption. We introduce a general causal inference problem we call the steerability of consumption that…

The question what determines the structure of natural food webs has been listed among the nine most important unanswered questions in ecology. It arises naturally from many problems related to ecosystem stability and resilience. The…

Cell cultures exhibit rich and complex behaviors driven by dynamic metabolic interactions among cells. In this work, we present a model that captures these interactions through a framework inspired by statistical mechanics. Using Monte…

The nonequilibrium phase transition in a system of diffusing, coagulating particles in the presence of a steady input and evaporation of particles is studied. The system undergoes a transition from a phase in which the average number of…

Given the increasing pressures exerted by climate change on small-scale agriculture, the importance of participatory modelling methodologies that can consider both the human and environmental components of these systems has become more and…

The central role of food in our individual and social life, combined with recent technological advances, has motivated a growing interest in applications that help to better monitor dietary habits as well as the exploration and retrieval of…

The global food system faces various endogeneous and exogeneous, biotic and abiotic risk factors, including a rising human population, higher population densities, price volatility and climate change. Quantitative models play an important…

Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…

Unravelling current complex food systems is relevant for their adjustment and redesign under the current changing climate conditions. Redesign may be necessitated by migration of people and changes of locations of major agri-food…

The evolution of observable quantities of finite quantum systems is analyzed when the latter are subject to nondestructive measurements. The type and number of measurements characterize the level of decoherence produced in the system. A…

Cultural values vary significantly around the world. Despite a large heterogeneity, similarities across national cultures are present. This paper studies cross-country culture heterogeneity via the joint inference of country-specific copula…

Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…

We analyze mathematical models of the global human population growth and compare them to actual dynamics of the world population and of the world surplus product. We consider a possibility that the so-called world's demographic transition…

Diet is a risk factor for many diseases. In nutritional epidemiology, studying reproducible dietary patterns is critical to reveal important associations with health. However, it is challenging: diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds may…

Nutrient gradients and limitations play a pivotal role in the life of all microbes, both in their natural habitat as well as in artificial, microfluidic systems. Spatial concentration gradients of nutrients in densely packed cell…

Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…

The most profound change in the relationship between humans and their environment was the introduction of agriculture and pastoralism. [....] For an understanding of the expansion process, it appears appropriate to apply a diffusive model.…

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…

Life uses non-equilibrium mechanisms to create ordered structures not attainable at equilibrium; the resulting order is assumed to provide functional benefits that outweigh costs of time and energy needed by these mechanisms. Here, we show…