Related papers: Is incoherence required for sustainability?
Diversity is a fundamental feature of ecosystems, even when the concept of ecosystem is extended to sociology or economics. Diversity can be intended as the count of different items, animals, or, more generally, interactions. There are two…
Understanding the origins of complexity is a fundamental challenge with implications for biological and technological systems. Network theory emerges as a powerful tool to model complex systems. Networks are an intuitive framework to…
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…
The implications of large-scale coherence in biological systems and possible links to quantum theory are only beginning to be explored. Whether quantum-like coherent phenomena are relevant, or even possible at all, at the high temperatures…
Transformations to create more sustainable social-ecological systems are urgently needed. Structural change is a feature of transformations of social-ecological systems that is of critical importance but is little understood. Here, we…
Many complex systems exhibit extreme events far more often than expected for a normal distribution. This work examines how self-similar bursts of activity across several orders of magnitude can emerge from first principles in systems that…
Imitation is an important learning heuristic in animal and human societies. Previous explorations report that the fate of individuals with cooperative strategies is sensitive to the protocol of imitation, leading to a conundrum about how…
Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…
Understanding how societies react to epidemic threats requires more than tracking infection curves. Public perception, collective memory and behavioural adaptation interact through feedback loops that can amplify or suppress the spread of…
We develop a mathematical model to describe the persistence of rule-breaking behaviors in societies, such as traffic violations, disregard for legal restrictions and other forms of noncompliance. Using a replicator-type dynamics with…
Living organisms, ecosystems, and social systems are examples of complex systems in which robustness against inclusion of new elements is an essential feature. A recently proposed simple model has revealed a general mechanism by which such…
The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…
The myriad microscopic interactions among the individual organisms that constitute an ecological system collectively give rise, at the macroscopic scale, to evolutionary trends. The ability to detect the directionality of such trends is…
A key quality of any kind of system is its ability to deliver its respective service correctly. Often the unavailability of commercial systems may lead to lost revenue, which are minor compared to what may be at stake when critical…
The possibility of complicated dynamic behaviour driven by non-linear feedbacks in dynamical systems has revolutionized science in the latter part of the last century. Yet despite examples of complicated frequency dynamics, the possibility…
This paper introduces a novel approach to quantifying ecological resilience in biological systems, particularly focusing on noisy systems responding to episodic disturbances with sudden adaptations. Incorporating concepts from…
The process of pattern formation for a multi-species model anchored on a time varying network is studied. A non homogeneous perturbation superposed to an homogeneous stable fixed point can amplify, as follows a novel mechanism of…
Multistability is a phenomenon prevalent in many natural systems. In climate, for example, it allows the possibility of irreversible consequences on planetary scale as a result of climate change. Indeed, a climate ``tipping element'' is a…
Socio-technical systems, where technological and human elements interact in a goal-oriented manner, provide important functional support to our societies. Here we draw attention to the underappreciated concept of timeliness -- i.e., system…