Related papers: Necessity and Chance: deterministic chaos in ecolo…
Ecosystems dynamics is often considered as driven by a coupling of species' resource consumption and its population size dynamics. Such resource-population dynamics is captured by MacArthur-type models. One biologically relevant feature…
When complex systems are driven to extinction by some external factor, their non-stationary dynamics can present an intermittent behaviour between relative tranquility and burst of activity whose consequences are often catastrophic. To…
As the diversity of people in higher education grows, Universities are struggling to provide inclusive environments that nurture the spirit of free inquiry in the presence of these differences. At the extreme, the value of diversity is…
May (1974,1976) opened the debate on whether biological populations might exhibit nonlinear dynamics and chaos. However, it has in general been difficult to verify nonlinear dynamics in biological populations. There are many reports…
This text is a slightly edited version of lecture notes for a course I gave at ETH, during the Winter term 2000-2001, to undergraduate Mathematics and Physics students. Contents: Chapter 1 - Examples of Dynamical Systems Chapter 2 -…
The calculus of looping sequences is a formalism for describing the evolution of biological systems by means of term rewriting rules. We enrich this calculus with a type discipline to guarantee the soundness of reduction rules with respect…
The statistical mechanics of Gibbs is a juxtaposition of subjective, probabilistic ideas on the one hand and objective, mechanical ideas on the other. In this paper, we follow the path set out by Jaynes, including elements added…
Jim Shapiro synthesizes a great many observations about the mechanisms of evolution to reach the remarkable conclusion that large-scale modification, exchange, and rearrangement of the genome are common and should be viewed as fundamental…
I describe my path to unconventionality in my exploration of theoretical and applied aspects of computation towards revealing the algorithmic and reprogrammable properties and capabilities of the world, in particular related to applications…
One of the mainstays of the controversial "rare Earth" hypothesis is the "Goldilocks problem" regarding various parameters describing a habitable planet, partially involving the role of mass extinctions and other catastrophic processes in…
Living things, computers, societies, and even books are part of a grand evolutionary struggle to survive. That struggle shapes nature, nations, religions, art, science, and you. What you think, feel, and do is determined by it. Darwinian…
This article examines the subtle relationship between chaos and randomness, two concepts that, although they refer to seemingly unpredictable phenomenon, are based on fundamentally different principles. Chaos manifests in deterministic…
Common ground to recent studies exploiting relations between dynamical systems and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics is, so we argue, the standard Gibbs formalism applied on the level of space-time histories. The assumptions (chaoticity…
In this paper, we develop a natural (empirical) relational theory for describing and modeling complex biological phenomena. We have as stepping stone the assertion: function implies structure. The theory is built upon a graph's theory…
Several years after the pioneering work by Fermi Pasta and Ulam, fundamental questions about the link between dynamical and statistical properties remain still open in modern statistical mechanics. Particularly controversial is the role of…
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down". Can Darwinian random mutations and selection…
Many of you reading these words will have been attracted by the discussion paper [McShane and Wyner (2011)], in which case, this may be the first, but hopefully not the last, time you will have read anything in a statistics journal. I would…
Modern biological tools have made it possible to unequivocally demonstrate the deep relationship among species in terms of genes and basic molecular mechanisms. In addition, results from genetic, physical and physiological approaches…
A tendency in biological theorizing is to formulate principles above or equal to Evolution by Variation and Selection of Darwin and Wallace. In this letter I analyze one such recent proposal which did so for the developmental ascendency. I…
The aim of this text is to provide a linguistically accessible, but comprehensive introduction into a variety of topics in dynamical systems and its applications. Whilst preliminary knowledge of dynamical systems is useful, it is not…