Related papers: Evolutionary Transitions and Top-Down Causation

We consider models of growing multi-level systems wherein the growth process is driven by rules of tournament selection. A system can be conceived as an evolving tree with a new node being attached to a contestant node at the best hierarchy…

In physics, I noticed subjects not explained by formulas were often not studied, like how uncontrolled growth systems changed form. Weather, businesses, societies, environments, communities, cultures, groups, relationships, lives, and…

We study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…

Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…

Understanding how cooperative behaviours can emerge from competitive interactions is an open problem in biology and social sciences. While interactions are usually modelled as pairwise networks, the units of many real-world systems can also…

The framework of Modern Theory of Critical State Transitions considers the relation between different levels of organization in complex systems in terms of Critical State Transitions. A State Transition between levels entails changes of…

Understanding systems level behaviour of many interacting agents is challenging in various ways, here we'll focus on the how the interaction between components can lead to hierarchical structures with different types of dynamics, or…

Societies change through time, entailing changes in behaviors and institutions. We ask how social change occurs when behaviors and institutions are interdependent. We model a group-structured society in which the transmission of individual…

Mathematical and computational models can assist in gaining an understanding of cell behavior at many levels of organization. Here, we review models in the literature that focus on eukaryotic cell motility at 3 size scales: intracellular…

How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal…

Human beings learn causal models and constantly use them to transfer knowledge between similar environments. We use this intuition to design a transfer-learning framework using object-oriented representations to learn the causal…

Humans interact with each other on a daily basis by developing and maintaining various social norms and it is critical to form a deeper understanding of how such norms develop, how they change, and how fast they change. In this work, we…

Natural selection and random drift are competing phenomena for explaining the evolution of populations. Combining a highly fit mutant with a population structure that improves the odds that the mutant spreads through the whole population…

In a laboratory experiment, round by round, individual interactions should lead to the social evolutionary rotation in population strategy state space. Successive switching the incentive parameter should lead to successive change of the…

Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for large pretrained models using standard techniques of deep learning.…

Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditionally competing "replicator-first" and "metabolism-first"…

Collective behavior is commonly attributed to direct interactions among system components. Using a minimal stochastic model, we show that higher-order collective structure can instead emerge from shared stochastic environments, even in the…

In ecology, climate and other fields, (sub)systems have been identified that can transition into a qualitatively different state when a critical threshold or tipping point in a driving process is crossed. An understanding of those tipping…

One of the main properties of biological systems is modularity, which manifests itself at all levels of their organization, starting with the level of molecular genetics, ending with the level of whole organisms and their communities. In a…

Tipping points occur in diverse systems in various disciplines such as ecology, climate science, economy or engineering. Tipping points are critical thresholds in system parameters or state variables at which a tiny perturbation can lead to…