Related papers: Quantifying Hierarchical Selection
Self-organization of heterogeneous particle swarms is rich in its dynamics but hard to design in a traditional top-down manner, especially when many types of kinetically distinct particles are involved. In this chapter, we discuss how we…
Selection on the level of loosely associated groups has been suggested as a route towards the evolution of cooperation between individuals and the subsequent formation of higher-level biological entities. Such group selection explanations…
Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying the general principles that determine the answer to this question is a central problem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncovered the general…
The interaction networks of biological systems are known to take on several non-random structural properties, some of which are believed to positively influence system robustness. Researchers are only starting to understand how these…
Evolutionary adaptation is the process that increases the fit of a population to the fitness landscape it inhabits. As a consequence, evolutionary dynamics is shaped, constrained, and channeled, by that fitness landscape. Much work has been…
There is evidence that the self-assembly of complex molecular systems often proceeds hierarchically, by first building subunits that later assemble in larger entities, in a process that can repeat multiple times. Yet, our understanding of…
Complex systems, such as economic, social, biological, and ecological systems, usually feature interactions not only between pairwise entities but also among three or more entities. These multi-entity interactions are known as higher-order…
From flocking birds to schooling fish, organisms interact to form collective dynamics across the natural world. Self-organization is present at smaller scales as well: cells interact and move during development to produce patterns in fish…
In many biological systems, natural selection acts simultaneously on multiple levels of organization. This scenario typically presents an evolutionary conflict between the incentive of individuals to cheat and the collective incentive to…
Biological networks of interacting agents exhibit similar topological properties for a wide range of scales, from cellular to ecological levels, suggesting the existence of a common evolutionary origin. A general evolutionary mechanism…
Species complexes are groups of closely related populations exchanging genes through dispersal. We study the dynamics of the structure of species complexes in a class of metapopulation models where demes can exchange genetic material…
Motivated by the results of recent laboratory experiments (Yoshida et al. Nature, 424, 303-306 (2003)) as well as many earlier field observations that evolutionary changes can take place in ecosystems over relatively short ecological time…
Understanding the behaviors of ecological systems is challenging given their multi-faceted complexity. To proceed, theoretical models such as Lotka-Volterra dynamics with random interactions have been investigated by the dynamical…
A class of models for large-scale evolution and mass extinctions is presented. These models incorporate environmental changes on all scales, from influences on a single species to global effects. This is a step towards a unified picture of…
Network science has evolved into an indispensable platform for studying complex systems. But recent research has identified limits of classical networks, where links connect pairs of nodes, to comprehensively describe group interactions.…
We propose a mathematical model for collective sensing in a population growing in a stochastically varying environment. In the population, individuals use an information channel for sensing the environment, and two channels for signal…
The assembly of ecological communities from a pool of species is central to ecology, but the effect of this process on properties of community interaction networks is still largely unknown. Here, we use a systematic analytical framework to…
The spontaneous organization of collective activities in animal groups and societies has attracted a considerable amount of attention over the last decade. This kind of coordination often permits group-living species to achieve collective…
Complex networks have become the main paradigm for modelling the dynamics of interacting systems. However, networks are intrinsically limited to describing pairwise interactions, whereas real-world systems are often characterized by…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…