Related papers: What can ecosystems learn? Expanding evolutionary …
Complex systems such as ecological communities and neuron networks are essential parts of our everyday lives. These systems are composed of units which interact through intricate networks. The ability to predict sudden changes in the…
At what level does selective pressure effectively act? When considering the reproductive dynamics of interacting and mutating agents, it has long been debated whether selection is better understood by focusing on the individual or if…
Indirect reciprocity maintains cooperation in stranger societies by mapping individual behaviors onto reputation signals via social norms. Existing theoretical frameworks assume static environments with constant resources and fixed payoff…
Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…
The social brain hypothesis postulates the increasing complexity of social interactions as a driving force for the evolution of cognitive abilities. Whereas dyadic and triadic relations play a basic role in defining social behaviours and…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
We study the collective behaviour of an ensemble of coupled motile elements whose interactions depend on time and are alternatively attractive or repulsive. The evolution of interactions is driven by individual internal variables with…
Interactions in natural communities can be highly heterogeneous, with any given species interacting appreciably with only some of the others, a situation commonly represented by sparse interaction networks. We study the consequences of…
The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…
Cooperation among unrelated individuals is frequently observed in social groups when their members combine efforts and resources to obtain a shared benefit that is unachievable by an individual alone. However, understanding why cooperation…
Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for…
Nested structure, which is non-random, controls cooperation dynamics and biodiversity in plant-animal mutualistic networks. This structural pattern has been explained in a static (non-growth) network models. However, evolutionary processes…
The environment has a strong influence on a population's evolutionary dynamics. Driven by both intrinsic and external factors, the environment is subject to continual change in nature. To capture an ever-changing environment, we consider a…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…
We study the statistics of ecosystems with a variable number of co-evolving species. The species interact in two ways: by prey-predator relationships and by direct competition with similar kinds. The interaction coefficients change slowly…
Collective, especially group-based, managerial decision making is crucial in organizations. Using an evolutionary theoretic approach to collective decision making, agent-based simulations were conducted to investigate how human collective…
Previous work has shown that species interacting in an ecosystem and actors transacting in an economic context may have notable similarities in behavior. However, the specific mechanism that may underlie similarities in nature and human…
The evolution processes of complex systems carry key information in the systems' functional properties. Applying machine learning algorithms, we demonstrate that the historical formation process of various networked complex systems can be…
How cooperation emerges in human societies is both an evolutionary enigma, and a practical problem with tangible implications for societal health. Population structure has long been recognized as a catalyst for cooperation because local…