Related papers: Scaling the human niche
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,…
Social interaction between microbes can be described at many levels of details, ranging from the biochemistry of cell-cell interactions to the ecological dynamics of populations. Choosing the best level to model microbial communities…
Biological organisms exhibit diverse strategies for adapting to varying environments. For example, a population of organisms may express the same phenotype in all environments (`unvarying strategy'), or follow environmental cues and express…
A novel mathematical framework is proposed to describe the ecological and evolutionary consequences of consumer--resource interactions. Both the consumer and resource are assumed to consist of several (sub)species, which interact between…
An ongoing debate in ecology concerns the impacts of ecological drift and selection on community assembly. Here, we show that there is a sharp phase transition in diverse ecological communities between a selection dominated regime (the…
Empirical studies of graphs have contributed enormously to our understanding of complex systems. Known today as network science, what was originally a theoretical study of graphs has grown into a more scientific exploration of communities…
I discuss the so-called stochastic individual based model of adaptive dynamics and in particular how different scaling limits can be obtained by taking limits of large populations, small mutation rate, and small effect of single mutations…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
Mathematical models of biological populations commonly use discrete structure classes to capture trait variation among individuals (e.g. age, size, phenotype, intracellular state). Upscaling these discrete models into continuum descriptions…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…
In an adaptive population which models financial markets and distributed control, we consider how the dynamics depends on the diversity of the agents' initial preferences of strategies. When the diversity decreases, more agents tend to…
Self-adaptive systems increasingly operate in close interaction with humans, often sharing the same physical or virtual environments and making decisions with ethical implications at runtime. Current approaches typically encode ethics as…
The relationships between diversity, productivity and scale determine much of the structure and robustness of complex biological and social systems. While arguments for the link between specialization and productivity are common, diversity…
We review the recent fast progress in statistical physics of evolving networks. Interest has focused mainly on the structural properties of random complex networks in communications, biology, social sciences and economics. A number of giant…
Empirical evidence suggests that social structure may have changed from hierarchical to egalitarian and back along the evolutionary line of humans. We model a society subject to competing cognitive and social navigation constraints. The…
One of the major characteristics of living organisms is metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy produced per unit of time. When the mass of organisms increases, the metabolic rate also increases (usually as a power function of mass),…
Patterns of word use both reflect and influence a myriad of human activities and interactions. Like other entities that are reproduced and evolve, words rise or decline depending upon a complex interplay between {their intrinsic properties…
A key unresolved question in microbial ecology is how the extraordinary diversity of microbiomes emerges from the behaviour of individual populations. This process is driven by the cross-feeding networks that structure these communities,…
Community structures have been identified in various complex real-world networks, for example, communication, information, internet and shareholder networks. The scaling of community size distribution indicates the heterogeneity in the…
Although networks provide a powerful approach to study a large variety of ecological systems, their formulation does not typically account for multiple interaction types, interactions that vary in space and time, and interconnected systems…