Related papers: Dynamic and Thermodynamic Models of Adaptation
The sensitivity of climate models to increasing CO2 concentration and the climate response at decadal time scales are still major factors of uncertainty for the assessment of the long and short term effects of anthropogenic climate change.…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
The concept of random dynamical system is a comparatively recent development combining ideas and methods from the well developed areas of probability theory and dynamical systems. Due to our inaccurate knowledge of the particular physical…
Several authors have hypothesized that ecological systems are subject to thermodynamic optimization, which, if proven correct, could represent a long sought general principle of organization in ecology. Although there have been recent…
The dynamics of molecular collisions in a macroscopic body are encoded by the parameter Thermodynamic entropy - a statistical measure of the number of molecular configurations that correspond to a given macrostate. Directionality in the…
The accuracy of a model to describe the horizontal dynamics of a confined quasi-two-dimensional system of inelastic hard spheres is discussed by comparing its predictions for the relaxation of the temperature in an homogenous system with…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
In many complex systems, the dynamical evolution of the different components can result in adaptation of the connections between them. We consider the problem of how a fully connected network of discrete-state dynamical elements which can…
Normal anxiety is considered an adaptive response to the possible presence of danger, but is susceptible to dysregulation. Anxiety disorders are prevalent at high frequency in contemporary human societies, yet impose substantial disability…
The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology however its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to…
There is an ongoing debate in the literature about whether the present global warming is increasing local and global temperature variability. The central methodological issues of this debate relate to the proper treatment of normalised…
Patterns are ubiquitous in nature, but how they form is often unclear. Turing developed a seminal theory to explain patterns based on reactions that counteract the equalizing tendency of diffusion. These reactions require continuous energy…
Energy savings from efficiency methods in individual residential buildings are measured in 10's of dollars, while the energy savings from such measures nationally would amount to 10's of billions of dollars, leading to the "tragedy of the…
Disordered systems theory provides powerful tools to analyze the generic behaviors of highdimensional systems, such as species-rich ecological communities or neural networks. By assuming randomness in their interactions, universality…
Notions of Darwinian selection have been implicit in economic theory for at least sixty years. Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter have argued that while evolutionary thinking was prevalent in prewar economics, the postwar Neoclassical school…
The understanding of the fundamental properties of the climate system has long benefitted from the use of simple numerical models able to parsimoniously represent the essential ingredients of its processes. Here we introduce a new model for…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
We developed a theory showing that under appropriate normalizations and rescalings, temperature response curves show a remarkably regular behavior and follow a general, universal law. The impressive universality of temperature response…
Self-organization is the autonomous assembly of a network of interacting components into a stable, organized pattern. This article shows that the process of self-assembly can be encoded in terms of evolutionary entropy, a statistical…