Some authors have hypothesized that the observed self-synchronized activity in ant colonies provides some adaptive advantages, and, in particular, it has been suggested that task realization may benefit from this ordered temporal pattern of behavior (Robinson, 1992; Hatcher et al., 1992). In this...

Thermodynamic depth is an appealing but flawed complexity measure. It depends on a set of macroscopic states for a system, but neither its original introduction by Lloyd and Pagels nor any follow-up work has considered how to select these states. Depth, therefore, is at root subjective....

Economic choices involving pollution, like those concerning common resources, relate to the emergence of cooperation among actors. Since pollution propagates in space, the temporal dynamics of economic choices is coupled to the spatial dynamics of pollution. We start from a simple description of...

In an influential paper, Grafen (1990) provided a mathematical demonstration of the validity of Zahavi's handicap principle . Grafen showed how an honest signalling system is stabilized through costly signalling: cost stabilizes the system when the cost of lying is greater than any benefit...

Particle-like objects are observed to propagate and interact in many spatially extended dynamical systems. For one of the simplest classes of such systems, one-dimensional cellular automata, we establish a rigorous upper bound on the number of distinct products that these interactions can...

A dynamical model of an ecological community is analyzed within a "mean-field approximation" in which one of the species interacts with the combination of all of the other species in the community. Within this approximation the model may be formulated as a master equation describing a one-step...

In this paper we investigate error-thresholds on dynamics fitness-landscapes. We show that there exists both a lower and an upper threshold, representing limits to the copying fidelity of simple replicators. The lower bound can be expressed as a correction term to the error-threshold present on...

This paper surveys the implications of ``common knowledge'' in interactive epistemology and game theory, with special emphasis on speculation, betting, agreeing to disagree, and coordination. The implications of approximate common knowledge are also analyzed. Approximate common knowledge is...

Current organization theories explain organizational form essentially through selection. That is, instead of focusing on the dynamics of emergence, the field as a whole adopts as its epistemology consequentialism, which emphasizes the relative performances, and hence death rates, of different...

In this paper we assume that parents use the signalling intensity of their young to determine how much food they bring to the nest, and that the pattern of food allocation is determined by the signalling intensity and by the intensity of other non-signalling behaviours that are not preceived by...