Related papers: Is incoherence required for sustainability?
Many social and biological systems are characterized by enduring hierarchies, including those organized around prestige in academia, dominance in animal groups, and desirability in online dating. Despite their ubiquity, the general…
Societal transformations are necessary to address critical global challenges, such as mitigation of anthropogenic climate change and reaching UN sustainable development goals. Recently, social tipping processes have received increased…
The abundance of different species in a community often follows the log series distribution. Other ecological patterns also have simple forms. Why does the complexity and variability of ecological systems reduce to such simplicity? Common…
In ecology, climate and other fields, (sub)systems have been identified that can transition into a qualitatively different state when a critical threshold or tipping point in a driving process is crossed. An understanding of those tipping…
Complex systems are difficult to study not only because they are nonlinear, multiscale, and often nonstationary, but because their scientifically relevant organization is often invisible at the level of individual components, pairwise…
Human perceptual and cognitive abilities are limited resources. Today, in the age of cheap information --cheap to produce, to manipulate, to disseminate--, this cognitive bottleneck translates into hypercompetition for visibility among…
Feedback loops are essential for regulating cell proliferation and maintaining the delicate balance between cell division and cell death. Thanks to the exact solution of a few simple models of cell growth it is by now clear that stochastic…
The Multiscale Law of Requisite Variety is a scientific law relating, at each scale, the variation in an environment to the variation in internal state that is necessary for effective response by a system. While this law has been used to…
Cycling chaos is a heteroclinic connection between several chaotic attractors, at which switching between the chaotic sets occur at growing time intervals. Here we characterize the coherence properties of these switchings, considering…
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are…
Just as a herd of animals relies on its robust social structure to survive in the wild, similarly robustness is a crucial characteristic for the survival of a complex network under attack. The capacity to measure robustness in complex…
Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…
A central premise in evolutionary biology is that individual variation can generate information asymmetries that facilitate the emergence of hierarchical organisation. To examine this process, we develop an agent-based model (ABM) to…
The stability of ecological systems is a fundamental concept in ecology, which offers profound insights into species coexistence, biodiversity, and community persistence. In this article, we provide a systematic and comprehensive review on…
An important feature of many complex systems, both natural and artificial, is the structure and organization of their interaction networks with interesting properties. Here we present a theory of self-organization by evolutionary adaptation…
Computing systems form the backbone of many aspects of our life, hence they are becoming as vital as water, electricity, and road infrastructures for our society. Yet, engineering long running computing systems that achieve their goals in…
When can complex ecological interactions drive an entire ecosystem into a persistent non-equilibrium state, where species abundances keep fluctuating without going to extinction? We show that high-diversity spatially-extended systems, in…
Hierarchy is one of the most conspicuous features of numerous natural, technological and social systems. The underlying structures are typically complex and their most relevant organizational principle is the ordering of the ties among the…
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
Many systems across the sciences evolve through a combination of multiplicative growth and diffusive transport. In the presence of disorder, these systems tend to form localized structures which alternate between long periods of relative…