Related papers: Ecosystems in the Anthropocene: transformative dri…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
Darwinian Theory depicts life as being overwhelmingly consumed by a fight for survival in a hostile environment. However, from a thermodynamic perspective, life is a dynamic, out of equilibrium process, stabilizing and coevolving in concert…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
It is argued that the tight interconnection between biological, climatological, and geophysical factors in the history of the terrestrial biosphere can teach us something of wider importance regarding the general astrobiological evolution…
Social institutions are systems of shared norms and rules that regulate people's behaviors, often emerging without external enforcement. They provide criteria to distinguish cooperation from defection and establish rules to sustain…
The dynamic nature of life's ability to thrive in diverse and changing planetary environments suggests that habitability and survival depend on the evolutionary path and life adaptation to environmental conditions. Here we explore such…
Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
Spatial systems with heterogeneities are ubiquitous in nature, from precipitation, temperature and soil gradients controlling vegetation growth to morphogen gradients controlling gene expression in embryos. Such systems, generally described…
Global Climate Models (GCMs) provide forecasts of future climate warming using a wide variety of highly sophisticated anthropogenic CO2 emissions models as input, each based on the evolution of four emissions "drivers": population p,…
The response of ecosystems to perturbations is considered from a thermodynamic perspective by acknowledging that, as for all macroscopic systems and processes, the dynamics and stability of ecosystems is subject to definite thermodynamic…
Human society and natural environment form a complex giant ecosystem, where human activities not only lead to the change of environmental states, but also react to them. By using collective-risk social dilemma game, some studies have…
The dynamics of ecosystem collapse are fundamental to determining how and why biological communities change through time, as well as the potential effects of extinctions on ecosystems. Here we integrate depictions of mammals from Egyptian…
A great number of biological organisms live in aqueous environments. Major evolutionary transitions, including the emergence of life itself, likely occurred in such environments. While the chemical aspects of the role of water in biology…
The notion that the whole is more than the sum of its parts has a long tradition in science. This, of course, also applies to the Earth system. With its myriad of processes, spanning from purely physical to life and human activity, the…
In this paper we highlight the scopes of engineering bio-inspired political systems, which are political systems based on the properties of life that self-organize the increasing complexity of human social systems. We describe bio-inspired…
Organisms result from adaptive processes interacting across different time scales. One such interaction is that between development and evolution. Models have shown that development sweeps over several traits in a single agent, sometimes…
Despite tremendous interest in the topic and decades of research, the origins of the major losses of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth remain elusive. A variety of possible causes for these mass-extinction events have been…
Natural selection imply that any organisms including human being will evolve to improve its fitness advantage and the selected genotype or phenotype in equilibrium state will not vary over the time. However, evolutionary process of…
Persistent economic competition is often justified as a mechanism of innovation, efficiency, and welfare maximization. Yet empirical evidence across disciplines reveals that competition systematically generates fragility, inequality, and…