Competition networks and ranking in games and social hierarchies
Noisy coexistence and entangled evolution
Abstract
Replication is one of the central processes in biological, ecological, evolutionary and, in more subtle ways, also social systems. Unsurprisingly, many dynamical systems designed to describe such phenomena implement replication in one form or another. Some are even labeled as such, for example the replicator equation, a keystone system whose many variants populate ecological and evolutionary modelling with admirable persistence. Despite their conceptual simplicity, replicator systems have a habit of producing surprises and sit at the center of long-standing controversies. One of these is an apparent paradox: the competitive exclusion principle, often a generic hallmark of replicator dynamics, seems fundamentally at odds with the remarkable diversity of species with very similar ecological functions observed in real ecosystems. Nature, it appears, did not read the textbook. Fluctuating environments and, more generally, noise have been proposed as a way out of this dilemma. Yet models that include noise tend to disagree with one another, leaving the puzzle very much alive. In this lecture, I will discuss how noise can affect replication in qualitatively different ways, why it matters which noise you add and how, how this may help us understand coexistence in ecosystems, and why thinking about all this may quietly reshape how we understand cooperation as a pervasive feature of the biosphere.
Online (Zoom) : https://iu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QXAmc5gvRGOWGRwV6rKDbw
Short Bio
Dirk Brockmann is Director of the Center Synergy of Systems (SynoSys) at TU Dresden and Professor of Biology and Physics at Dresden University of Technology. Trained in physics and mathematics at the University of Göttingen, where he earned his PhD in theoretical physics, he has held faculty positions at Humboldt University of Berlin and Northwestern University and led a research team at the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s national public health institute. His research spans infectious disease dynamics, human mobility, network theory, and citizen science, with a focus on extracting insight from large-scale digital data. An advocate of anti-disciplinary science, he seeks to bridge biological and social sciences and make complexity science accessible through initiatives such as Complexity Explorables.