Related papers: Law of the Minimum Paradoxes
A natural process is defined as an act, by which a system organizes itself with time. Any natural process drives a system to a state of greater organization. Organization is a progressive change, while evolution is expressed in the effects…
The Principle of Least Action has evolved and established itself as the most basic law of physics. This allows us to see how this fundamental law of nature determines the development of the system towards states with less action, i.e.,…
Modern ecology has re-emphasized the need for a quantitative understanding of the original 'survival of the fittest theme' based on analyzis of the intricate trade-offs between competing evolutionary strategies that characterize the…
Regardless of a system's complexity or scale, its growth can be considered to be a spontaneous thermodynamic response to a local convergence of down-gradient material flows. Here it is shown how growth can be constrained to a few distinct…
We present an agent-based model inspired by the Evolutionary Minority Game (EMG), albeit strongly adapted to the case of competition for limited resources in ecology. The agents in this game become able, after some time, to predict the a…
Monod's law is a widely accepted phenomenology for bacterial growth. Since it has the same functional form as the Michaelis--Menten equation for enzyme kinetics, cell growth is often considered to be locally constrained by a single…
Extremal principles are fundamental in our interpretation of phenomena in nature. One of the best known examples is the second law of thermodynamics, governing most physical and chemical systems and stating the continuous increase of…
The law of proportionate growth simply states that the time dependent change of a quantity $x$ is proportional to $x$. Its applicability to a wide range of dynamic phenomena is based on various assumptions for the proportionality factor,…
Agents acting in the natural world aim at selecting appropriate actions based on noisy and partial sensory observations. Many behaviors leading to decision mak- ing and action selection in a closed loop setting are naturally phrased within…
For a branching process in random environment it is assumed that the offspring distribution of the individuals varies in a random fashion, independently from one generation to the other. Interestingly there is the possibility that the…
One of the fundamental problems in biology concerns the method by which a cluster of organisms can regulate the proportion of individuals that perform various roles or modes as if each individual knows a whole situation without a leader. A…
Population-level scaling in ecological systems arises from individual growth and death with competitive constraints. We build on a minimal dynamical model of metabolic growth where the tension between individual growth and mortality…
The short-board effect, analogous to Liebig's Law of the Minimum, postulates that the collective performance of a team is constrained by its weakest component. This principle has profound implications for the optimization of collaboration…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
McNamara and Dall (2011) identified novel relationships between the abundance of a species in different environments, the temporal properties of environmental change, and selection for or against dispersal. Here, the mathematics underlying…
A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non-human animal species have provided evidence for…
Fifty years ago, Robert MacArthur showed that stable equilibria optimize quadratic functions of the population sizes in several important ecological models. Here, we generalize this finding to a broader class of systems within the framework…
If evolution can be connected to the principle of least action, and if it is depicted in evolution space versus time then it corresponds to the direction of ultimate causation. As an organism evolves and follows a path of proximate…
The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary,…
This paper investigates the role of size in biological organisms. More specifically, how the energy demand, expressed by the metabolic rate, changes according to the mass of an organism. Empirical evidence suggests a power-law relation…