A model in which heterogeneous agents form firms is described and empirically tested. Each agent has preferences for both income and leisure and provides a variable input ('effort') to production. There are increasing returns to cooperation, and agents self-organize into productive teams. Within...

Why are some ecosystems so rich, but yet contain so many rare species? High species diversity, together with rarity, is a general trend in neotropical forests and coral reefs. But the origin of such diversity and the consequences of food web complexity in both species abundances and temporal...

Most models of natural selection assume either that the material environment remains constant or that it fluctuates in ways unrelated to changes in gene frequencies (and therefore changes in the distribution of phenotypes) of the organism undergoing selection. In this paper, we consider what...

In the study of complex systems---in particular self-organizing systems---the notions of emergence and higher order structures come up. A framework for studying them was given in [1,2] where the notion of a hyperstructures occur both in an intuitive and a formal sense. But in formalizations of...

Complex, fractal structures are widespread in ecological systems and in some characteristic features of evolutionary processes. The origin of such patterns in terms of their dynamics is a challenging problem. A theory for these phenomena might have important implications in issues like the...

Highly optimized tolerance is a model of optimization in engineered systems, which gives rise to power-law distributions of failure events in such systems. The archetypal example is the highly optimized forest fire model. Here we give an analytic solution for this model which explains the origin...

The dynamics of origination in the fossil record of three marine groups (molluscs, echinoderms and fishes) and three terrestrial groups (mammals, insects and plants) is analyzed in this paper. Four hypotheses are tested: (1) secular decline in lineage origination; (2) secular decline in...

"Glider" dynamics in cellular automata (CA), where coherent configurations emerge and interact, provide a stark instance of self-organization in a simple system. Such behaviour was classified as class 4 or complex (as opposed to ordered or chaotic) by Wolfram, and was one of the original...

How are biodiversity dynamics developmentally constrained at various hierarchical levels? Patterns of diversity and associated process theories have conventionally been treated in extrinsic, particularly ecological, terms, and development has not been sufficiently integrated into discussions of...