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In this paper, we examine how patterns of scientific collaboration contribute to knowledge creation. Recent studies have shown that scientists can benefit from their position within collaborative networks by being able to receive more…
It is now a commonplace observation that human society is becoming a coherent super-organism, and that the information infrastructure forms its emerging brain. Perhaps, as the underlying technologies are likely to become billions of times…
Silicon has striking similarity with carbon and is found in plant cells. However, there is no specific role that has been assigned to silicon in the life cycle of plants. The amount of silicon in plant cells is species specific and can…
Civilization produces knowledge, which acts as the driving force of its development. A macro-model of civilization that accounts for the effect of knowledge production on population, energy consumption and environmental conditions is…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
The underlying physiological mechanisms of generating conscious states are still unknown. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we will need to experimentally design a system that evolves in a similar way our brains do. Recent…
Nature is an inhabitant for enormous number of species. All the species do perform complex activities with simple and elegant rules for their survival. The property of emergence of collective behavior is remarkably supporting their…
Living systems implement and execute an extraordinary plethora of computational tasks. The inherent degree of large scale coordination emerges as a global property, from the intricate sea of microscopic interactions. The brain, with its…
This paper proposes a neuronal circuitry layout and synaptic plasticity principles that allow the (pyramidal) neuron to act as a "combinatorial switch". Namely, the neuron learns to be more prone to generate spikes given those combinations…
Motivation is a central driver of human behavior, shaping decisions, goals, and task performance. As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly aligned with human preferences, we ask whether they exhibit something akin to motivation.…
Migration is a key mechanism for expansion of communities. In spatially heterogeneous environments, rapidly gaining knowledge about the local environment is key to the evolutionary success of a migrating population. For historical human…
As oxygen is essential for respiration and metabolism for multicellular organisms on Earth, its presence may be crucial for the development of a complex biosphere on other planets. And because life itself, through photosynthesis,…
Cooperative behaviors are defined as the production of common goods benefitting all members of the community at the producer's cost. They could seem to be in contradiction with natural selection, as non-cooperators have an increased fitness…
We study the decoherence of a central spin-1/2 due to a closed environment composed of spin-1/2 particles. It is known that a frustrated spin environment, such as a spin glass, is much more efficient for decoherence of the central spin than…
Mutualisms are key for structuring ecological communities, but they are sensitive to environmental change and fluctuations in population size. Consequently, how mutualisms achieve stability remains an open question in ecological theory.…
Understanding what and how causal dynamical mechanisms generate collective phenomena is a central challenge in complexity science. Recent studies have focused on identifying the mechanisms underlying the synergistic interdependencies that…
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…
Many mathematical models of evolution assume that all individuals experience the same environment. Here, we study the Moran process in heterogeneous environments. The population is of finite size with two competing types, which are exposed…
Social media platforms systematically reward popularity over authenticity, incentivizing users to strategically tailor their expression for attention. In this paper, we introduce (i) popularity as a strategic expression mechanism, distinct…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…