Related papers: Quantifying Hierarchical Selection
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
The interplay between energy efficiency and evolutionary mechanisms is addressed. One important question is how evolutionary mechanisms can select for the optimised usage of energy in situations where it does not lead to immediate…
In the analysis of complex ecosystems it is common to use random interaction coefficients, often assumed to be such that all species are statistically equivalent. In this work we relax this assumption by choosing interactions according to…
It is well-known that population structure is a catalyst for the evolution of cooperation since individuals can reciprocate with their neighbors through local interactions defined by network structures. Previous research typically relies on…
A conflict exists between field biologists and physiologists ("functional biologists" or "evolutionary ecologists") on the one hand and those working in molecular evolution ("evolutionary biologists" or "population geneticists") on the…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
Understanding how species persist under interacting stressors is a central challenge in ecology. We develop a spatially explicit reaction-diffusion framework to investigate competing species in landscapes shaped by climate variability,…
Coevolutionary dynamics is investigated in chemical catalysis, biological evolution, social and economic systems. The dynamics of these systems can be analyzed within the unifying framework of evolutionary game theory. In this Letter, we…
Hierarchy seems to pervade complexity in both living and artificial systems. Despite its relevance, no general theory that captures all features of hierarchy and its origins has been proposed yet. Here we present a formal approach resulting…
Evolutionary graph theory is a well established framework for modelling the evolution of social behaviours in structured populations. An emerging consensus in this field is that graphs that exhibit heterogeneity in the number of connections…
We consider models of growing multi-level systems wherein the growth process is driven by rules of tournament selection. A system can be conceived as an evolving tree with a new node being attached to a contestant node at the best hierarchy…
Non-uniform rates of morphological evolution and evolutionary increases in organismal complexity, captured in metaphors like "adaptive zones", "punctuated equilibrium" and "blunderbuss patterns", require more elaborate explanations than a…
In the last years, a remarkable theoretical effort has been made in order to understand stability and complexity in ecological communities. The non-random structures of real ecological interaction networks has been recognized as one key…
It has been widely recognized that the performance of a multi-agent system is highly affected by its organization. A large scale system may have billions of possible ways of organization, which makes it impractical to find an optimal choice…
Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…
Representing social systems as networks, starting from the interactions between individuals, sheds light on the mechanisms governing their dynamics. However, networks encode only pairwise interactions, while most social interactions occur…
Interactions between people are the basis on which the structure of our society arises as a complex system and, at the same time, are the starting point of any physical description of it. In the last few years, much theoretical research has…
A cluster theory based mathematical model was developed and used to simulate the dynamics of a system composed of a large number of interacting agents-clusters with different size. The case of a system formed by a constant total number of…
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…
Top-down causation has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems. Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down…