Related papers: A knowledge-based model of civilization under clim…

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…

This paper presents a conceptual model describing the medium and long-term co-evolution of natural and socio-economic subsystems of Earth. An economy is viewed as an out-of-equilibrium dissipative structure that can only be maintained with…

Scientific knowledge and advances are a cornerstone of modern society. They improve our understanding of the world we live in and help us navigate global challenges including emerging infectious diseases, climate change and the biodiversity…

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 response of ecosystems to perturbations is considered from a thermodynamic perspective by acknowledging that, as for all macroscopic systems and processes, the dynamics and stability of ecosystems is subject to definite thermodynamic…

Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…

Scientific research is a major driving force in a knowledge based economy. Income, health and wellbeing depend on scientific progress. The better we understand the inner workings of the scientific enterprise, the better we can prompt,…

When the climate system is forced, e.g. by emission of greenhouse gases, it responds on multiple time scales. As temperatures rise, feedback processes might intensify or weaken. Current methods to analyze feedback strength, however, do not…

We consider the effect of non-constant parameters on the human-forest interaction logistic model coupled with human technological growth introduced in "Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis"[1]. In…

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…

Climate change has become intertwined with the global economy. Here, we describe the importance of inertia to continued growth in energy consumption. Drawing from thermodynamic arguments, and using 38 years of available statistics between…

Social behaviour models are increasingly integrated into climate change studies, and the significance of climate tipping points for `runaway' climate change is well recognised. However, there has been insufficient focus on tipping points in…

Despite major advances in climate science over the last 30 years, persistent uncertainties in projections of future climate change remain. Climate projections are produced with increasingly complex models which attempt to represent key…

Despite tremendous interest in the topic and decades of research, the origins of the major losses of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth remain elusive. A variety of possible causes for these mass-extinction events have been…

The economic impacts of climate change are highly uncertain. Two of the most important uncertainties are the sensitivity of the climate system and the so-called damage functions, which relate climate change to economic damages and benefits.…

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…

Computer modelling for evolutionary systems consists in: 1) to store in the memory the individual features of each member of a large population; and 2) to update the whole system repeatedly, as time goes by, according to some prescribed…

We investigate how knowledge percolates and clusters in a given knowledge space. We introduce a simple model of knowledge organization in which each contribution spans a certain number of items. If this contribution overlaps with others…

Earth's future detectability depends upon the trajectory of our civilization over the coming centuries. Human civilization is also the only known example of an energy-intensive civilization, so our history and future trajectories provide…

Complex systems throughout Nature display structures and functions that are built and maintained, at least in part, by optimal energies flowing through them--not specific, ideal values, rather ranges in energy rate density below which…