Related papers: Facing Complexity: Prediction vs. Adaptation
Our knowledge of the Universe remains discovery-led: in the absence of adequate physics-based theory, interpretation of new results requires a scientific methodology. Commonly, scientific progress in astrophysics is motivated by the…
Since Newton, all classical and quantum physics depends upon the "Newtonian Paradigm". Here the relevant variables of the system are identified. The boundary conditions creating the phase space of all possible values of the variables are…
The intrinsic difficulties in building realistic climate models and in providing complete, reliable and meaningful observational datasets, and the conceptual impossibility of testing theories against data imply that the usual Galilean…
A vast body of literature addresses the complex nature of science's reproducibility crisis. In contrast with this perceived complexity, some recent papers from the discipline of physics suggests that irreproducibility does not point to a…
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,…
The majority of historical designs are a priori in nature, where a priori indicates a design can be specified in advance of the experiment. The conventional wisdom is that the set of a priori designs is sufficient to produce efficient…
The problem of pattern selection arises when the evolution equations have many solutions, whereas observed patterns constitute a much more restricted set. An approach is advanced for treating the problem of pattern selection by defining the…
The familiar theories of physics have the feature that the application of the theory to make predictions in specific circumstances can be done by means of an algorithm. We propose a more precise formulation of this feature --- one based on…
The human mind is known to be sensitive to complexity. For instance, the visual system reconstructs hidden parts of objects following a principle of maximum simplicity. We suggest here that higher cognitive processes, such as the selection…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
To a good extent, words can be understood as corresponding to patterns or categories that appeared in order to represent concepts and structures that are particularly important or useful in a given time and space. Words are characterized by…
All living things exhibit adaptations that enable them to survive and reproduce in the natural environment that they inhabit. From a biological standpoint, it has long been understood that adaptation comes from natural selection, whereby…
The phenomenon of preadaptation, or exaptation (wherein a trait that originally evolved to solve one problem is co-opted to solve a new problem) presents a formidable challenge to efforts to describe biological phenomena using a classical…
The atmosphere is chaotic. This fundamental property of the climate system makes forecasting weather incredibly challenging: it's impossible to expect weather models to ever provide perfect predictions of the Earth system beyond timescales…
A qualitatively new, much more liberal and efficient organisation of science is proposed and justified, in connection with growing debate about further role and development of fundamental science. Although the key ideas can be explained…
Cosmology in extended theories of gravity is considered assuming the Palatini variational principle, for which the metric and connection are independent variables. The field equations are derived to linear order in perturbations about the…
In a complex community, species continuously adapt to each other. On rare occasions, the adaptation of a species can lead to the extinction of others, and even its own. "Adaptive dynamics" is the standard mathematical framework to describe…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
The problem of prediction consists in forecasting the conditional distribution of the next outcome given the past. Assume that the source generating the data is such that there is a stationary ergodic predictor whose error converges to zero…
Epidemic outbreaks of new pathogens, or known pathogens in new populations, cause a great deal of fear because they are hard to predict. For theoretical models of disease spreading, on the other hand, quantities characterizing the outbreak…