Related papers: Social Evolution: New Horizons
Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…
Technology is increasingly shaping our social structures and is becoming a driving force in altering human biology. Besides, human activities already proved to have a significant impact on the Earth system which in turn generates complex…
Models of strategy evolution on static networks help us understand how population structure can promote the spread of traits like cooperation. One key mechanism is the formation of altruistic spatial clusters, where neighbors of a…
Cooperative behavior constitutes a key aspect of human society and non-human animal systems, but explaining how cooperation evolves represents a major scientific challenge. It is now well established that social network structure plays a…
In Evolutionary Dynamics the understanding of cooperative phenomena in natural and social systems has been the subject of intense research during decades. We focus attention here on the so-called "Lattice Reciprocity" mechanisms that…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
The assembly of ecological communities from a pool of species is central to ecology, but the effect of this process on properties of community interaction networks is still largely unknown. Here, we use a systematic analytical framework to…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
The emergence and prevalence of cooperative behavior within a group of selfish individuals remains a puzzle for \text{evolutionary game theory} precisely because it conflicts directly with the central idea of natural selection. Accordingly,…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Many complex adaptive systems contain a large diversity of specialized components. The specialization at the level of the microscopic degrees of freedom, and diversity at the level of the system as a whole are phenomena that appear during…
Situations of conflict giving rise to social dilemmas are widespread in society and game theory is one major way in which they can be investigated. Starting from the observation that individuals in society interact through networks of…
A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by…
Methods of statistical physics have proven valuable for studying the evolution of cooperation in social dilemma games. However, recent empirical research shows that cooperative behavior in social dilemmas is only one kind of a more general…
This conference shows the impressive rate of advances in the observations and theoretical interpretations of large-scale structure. But to explain my feeling that we may still have a lot to learn I offer some comments on our sociology,…
The structure of social networks is a key determinant in fostering cooperation and other altruistic behavior among naturally selfish individuals. However, most real social interactions are temporal, being both finite in duration and spread…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
There has been a long debate on how new levels of organization have evolved. It might seem unlikely, as cooperation must prevail over competition. One well-studied example is the emergence of autocatalytic sets, which seem to be a…