Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Evolution And Transitions In Complexity
Download Evolution And Transitions In Complexity full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Evolution And Transitions In Complexity ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Evolution and Transitions in Complexity by : Gerard A.J.M Jagers op Akkerhuis
Download or read book Evolution and Transitions in Complexity written by Gerard A.J.M Jagers op Akkerhuis and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses several recent theoretic advancements in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary integration in the field of evolution. While exploring novel views, the text maintains a close link with one of the most broadly held views on evolution, namely that of “Darwinian evolution.” This work puts forth a new point of view which allows researchers to define in detail the concept of evolution. To create this conceptual definition, the text applies a stringent object-based focus. With this focus, the editor has been able to develop an object-based pattern of evolution at the smallest scale. Subsequently, this smallest scale pattern is used as an innovative basis for generalizations. These generalizations create links between biological Darwinism and generalized Darwinism. The object-based approach that was used to suggest innovations in the field of Darwinian evolution also allowed for contributions to other topics, such as major evolutionary transitions theory, the definition of life and the relationships between evolution, self-organization and thermodynamics. Together, the chapters of this book and the multidisciplinary reflections and comments of various specialists on these chapters offer an exciting palette of innovative ideas.
Book Synopsis The Major Transitions in Evolution by : John Maynard Smith
Download or read book The Major Transitions in Evolution written by John Maynard Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-10-30 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During evolution there have been several major changes in the way genetic information is organized and transmitted from one generation to the next. These transitions include the origin of life itself, the first eukaryotic cells, reproduction by sexual means, the appearance of multicellular plants and animals, the emergence of cooperation and of animal societies. This is the first book to discuss all these major transitions and their implications for our understanding of evolution.Clearly written and illustrated with many original diagrams, this book will be welcomed by students and researchers in the fields of evolutionary biology, ecology, and genetics.
Book Synopsis Critical Transitions in Nature and Society by : Marten Scheffer
Download or read book Critical Transitions in Nature and Society written by Marten Scheffer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we explain the remarkably abrupt changes that sometimes occur in nature and society--and can we predict why and when they happen? This book offers a comprehensive introduction to critical transitions in complex systems--the radical changes that happen at tipping points when thresholds are passed. Marten Scheffer accessibly describes the dynamical systems theory behind critical transitions, covering catastrophe theory, bifurcations, chaos, and more. He gives examples of critical transitions in lakes, oceans, terrestrial ecosystems, climate, evolution, and human societies. And he demonstrates how to deal with these transitions, offering practical guidance on how to predict tipping points, how to prevent "bad" transitions, and how to promote critical transitions that work for us and not against us. Scheffer shows the time is ripe for understanding and managing critical transitions in the vast and complex systems in which we live. This book can also serve as a textbook and includes a detailed appendix with equations. Provides an accessible introduction to dynamical systems theory Covers critical transitions in lakes, oceans, terrestrial ecosystems, the climate, evolution, and human societies Explains how to predict tipping points Offers strategies for preventing "bad" transitions and triggering "good" ones Features an appendix with equations
Book Synopsis Phase Transitions by : Ricard V. Solé
Download or read book Phase Transitions written by Ricard V. Solé and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-14 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phase transitions--changes between different states of organization in a complex system--have long helped to explain physics concepts, such as why water freezes into a solid or boils to become a gas. How might phase transitions shed light on important problems in biological and ecological complex systems? Exploring the origins and implications of sudden changes in nature and society, Phase Transitions examines different dynamical behaviors in a broad range of complex systems. Using a compelling set of examples, from gene networks and ant colonies to human language and the degradation of diverse ecosystems, the book illustrates the power of simple models to reveal how phase transitions occur. Introductory chapters provide the critical concepts and the simplest mathematical techniques required to study phase transitions. In a series of example-driven chapters, Ricard Solé shows how such concepts and techniques can be applied to the analysis and prediction of complex system behavior, including the origins of life, viral replication, epidemics, language evolution, and the emergence and breakdown of societies. Written at an undergraduate mathematical level, this book provides the essential theoretical tools and foundations required to develop basic models to explain collective phase transitions for a wide variety of ecosystems.
Book Synopsis The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited by : Brett Calcott
Download or read book The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited written by Brett Calcott and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-04-22 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, prominent scholars return to the question posed in a pathbreaking book: how evolution itself evolved. In 1995, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry published their influential book The Major Transitions in Evolution. The "transitions" that Maynard Smith and Szathmáry chose to describe all constituted major changes in the kinds of organisms that existed but, most important, these events also transformed the evolutionary process itself. The evolution of new levels of biological organization, such as chromosomes, cells, multicelled organisms, and complex social groups radically changed the kinds of individuals natural selection could act upon. Many of these events also produced revolutionary changes in the process of inheritance, by expanding the range and fidelity of transmission, establishing new inheritance channels, and developing more open-ended sources of variation. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry had planned a major revision of their work, but the death of Maynard Smith in 2004 prevented this. In this volume, prominent scholars (including Szathmáry himself) reconsider and extend the earlier book's themes in light of recent developments in evolutionary biology. The contributors discuss different frameworks for understanding macroevolution, prokaryote evolution (the study of which has been aided by developments in molecular biology), and the complex evolution of multicellularity.
Book Synopsis The Social Evolution of Human Nature by : Harry Smit
Download or read book The Social Evolution of Human Nature written by Harry Smit and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harry Smit examines the elements of current evolutionary theory and how they bear on the evolution of the human mind.
Book Synopsis Evolution in Action: Past, Present and Future by : Wolfgang Banzhaf
Download or read book Evolution in Action: Past, Present and Future written by Wolfgang Banzhaf and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-08 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited research monograph brings together contributions from computer scientists, biologists, and engineers who are engaged with the study of evolution and how it may be applied to solve real-world problems. It also serves as a Festschrift dedicated to Erik D. Goodman, the founding director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, a pioneering NSF Science and Technology Center headquartered at Michigan State University. The contributing authors are leading experts associated with the center, and they serve in top research and industrial establishments across the US and worldwide. Part I summarizes the history of the BEACON Center, with refreshingly personal chapters that describe Erik's working and leadership style, and others that discuss the development and successes of the center in the context of research funding, projects, and careers. The chapters in Part II deal with the evolution of genomes and evolvability. The contributions in Part III discuss the evolution of behavior and intelligence. Those in Part IV concentrate on the evolution of communities and collective dynamics. The chapters in Part V discuss selected evolutionary computing applications in domains such as arts and science, automated program repair, cybersecurity, mechatronics, and genomic prediction. Part VI deals with evolution in the classroom, using creativity in research, and responsible conduct in research training. The book concludes with a special chapter from Erik Goodman, a short biography that concentrates on his personal positive influences and experiences throughout his long career in academia and industry.
Book Synopsis Innovation, Evolution and Complexity Theory by : Koen Frenken
Download or read book Innovation, Evolution and Complexity Theory written by Koen Frenken and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2006-03-29 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The motivation behind this book is the desire to integrate complexity theory into economic models of technological evolution. By means of developing an evolutionary model of complex technological systems, the book contributes to the neo-Schumpetarian literature on innovation, diffusion and technological paradigms.
Book Synopsis The Major Transitions in Evolution by : John Maynard Smith
Download or read book The Major Transitions in Evolution written by John Maynard Smith and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection by : John Tyler Bonner
Download or read book The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection written by John Tyler Bonner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Tyler Bonner makes a new attack on an old problem: the question of how progressive increase in the size and complexity of animals and plants has occurred. "How is it," he inquires, "that an egg turns into an elaborate adult? How is it that a bacterium, given many millions of years, could have evolved into an elephant?" The author argues that we can understand this progression in terms of natural selection, but that in order to do so we must consider the role of development--or more precisely the role of life cycles--in evolutionary change. In a lively writing style that will be familiar to readers of his work The Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton, 1980), Bonner addresses a general audience interested in biology, as well as specialists in all areas of evolutionary biology. What is novel in the approach used here is the comparison of complexity inside the organism (especially cell differentiation) with the complexity outside (that is, within an ecological community). Matters of size at both these levels are closely related to complexity. The book shows how an understanding of the grand course of evolution can come from combining our knowledge of genetics, development, ecology, and even behavior.
Book Synopsis Evolutionary Transitions to Multicellular Life by : Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo
Download or read book Evolutionary Transitions to Multicellular Life written by Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-03-27 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book integrates our understanding of the factors and processes underlying the evolution of multicellularity by providing several complementary perspectives (both theoretical and experimental) and using examples from various lineages in which multicellularity evolved. Recent years marked an increased interest in understanding how and why these transitions occurred, and data from various fields are providing new insights into the forces driving the several independent transitions to multicellular life as well as into the genetic and molecular basis for the evolution of this phenotype. The ultimate goal of this book is to facilitate the identification of general and unifying principles and mechanisms.
Book Synopsis Engineering Scalable Digital Models to Study Major Transitions in Evolution by : Matthew Andres Moreno
Download or read book Engineering Scalable Digital Models to Study Major Transitions in Evolution written by Matthew Andres Moreno and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolutionary transitions occur when previously-independent replicating entities unite to form more complex individuals. Such major transitions in individuality have profoundly shaped complexity, novelty, and adaptation over the course of natural history. Regard for their causes and consequences drives many fundamental questions in biology. Likewise, evolutionary transitions have been highlighted as a hallmark of true open-ended evolution in artificial life. As such, experiments with digital multicellularity promise to help realize computational systems with properties that more closely resemble those of biological systems, ultimately providing insights about the origins of complex life in the natural world and contributing to bio-inspired distributed algorithm design.Major challenges exist, however, in applying high-performance computing hardware to realize the dynamic, large-scale digital artificial life simulations required for such work. This dissertation presents two new tools designed to facilitate digital multicellularity experiments at scale: the Conduit library for best-effort communication and the hstrat ("hereditary stratigraphy") library, which debuts novel decentralized algorithms to estimate phylogenetic distance between evolving agents.Most current parallel and distributed high-performance computing work emphasizes logical determinism: extra effort is expended to guarantee reliable communication and, when necessary, computation halts in order to await expected messages. Determinism does enable hardware-independent algorithmic results and perfect reproducibility, however adopting a best-effort communication model can substantially reduce synchronization overhead and allow dynamic (albeit, potentially lossy) scaling of communication load to fully utilize available resources. We present a set of experiments to empirically characterize the best-effort communication model implemented by the Conduit library on commercially available high-performance computing hardware. We find that best-effort communication through Conduit enables significantly better computational performance under high thread and process counts and can help achieve significantly better solution quality within a fixed time constraint.In a similar vein, existing digital evolution work that incorporates phylogenetic analysis does so through a perfect tracking model where each birth event is recorded in a centralized data structure. This approach, however, does not easily scale to distributed computing environments where agents may migrate between a dynamic set of disjoint processing elements. Additionally, this perfect tracking approach is not robust to data loss or corruption. To provide for phylogenetic analyses in these environments, we propose an approach to infer phylogenies via heritable genetic annotations. We introduce hereditary stratigraphy, an algorithm that enables efficient, fault-tolerant phylogenetic reconstruction with tunable trade-offs between annotation memory footprint and reconstruction accuracy. For example, this approach can estimate the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) generation of two genomes within 10% relative error with 95% confidence up to a depth of a trillion generations with genome annotations smaller than a kilobyte. We simulate inference over known lineages, recovering up to 85% of the information contained in the original tree using only a 64-bit annotation.We harness these tools in DISHTINY, a distributed digital evolution system designed to study digital organisms as they undergo major evolutionary transitions in individuality. This system allows digital cells to form and replicate kin groups by selectively adjoining or expelling daughter cells. The capability to recognize kin-group membership enables preferential communication and cooperation between cells. We report group-level traits characteristic of fraternal transitions in the natural world. These include reproductive division of labor, resource sharing within kin groups, resource investment in offspring groups, asymmetrical behaviors mediated by messaging, morphological patterning, and adaptive apoptosis. In one detailed case study, we track the co-evolution of novelty, complexity, and adaptation over the evolutionary history of an experiment. We characterize ten qualitatively distinct multicellular morphologies, several of which exhibit asymmetrical growth and distinct life stages. Our case study suggests a loose, sometimes divergent, relationship can exist among novelty, complexity, and adaptation.The constructive potential inherent in major evolutionary transitions holds great promise for progress toward replicating the capability and robustness of natural organisms. Coupled with shrewd software engineering and innovative model design informed by evolutionary theory, contemporary hardware systems could plausibly already suffice to realize paradigm-shifting advances in open-ended evolution and, ultimately, scientific understanding of major transitions themselves. This work establishes important new tools and methodologies to support continuing progress in this direction.
Book Synopsis Development and Evolution by : Stanley N. Salthe
Download or read book Development and Evolution written by Stanley N. Salthe and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Development and Evolution surveys and illuminates the key themes of rapidly changing fields and areas of controversy that the redefining the theory and philosophy of biology. It continues Stanley Salthe's investigation of evolutionary theory, begun in his influential book Evolving Hierarchical Systems, while negating the implicit philosophical mechanisms of much of that work. Here Salthe attempts to reinitiate a theory of biology from the perspective of development rather than from that of evolution, recognizing the applicability of general systems thinking to biological and social phenomena and pointing towards a non-Darwinian and even a postmodern biology.
Book Synopsis The Codes of Life by : Marcello Barbieri
Download or read book The Codes of Life written by Marcello Barbieri and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-10-26 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on a range of disciplines – from biology and anthropology to philosophy and linguistics – this book draws on the expertise of leading names in the study of organic, mental and cultural codes brought together by the emerging discipline of biosemiotics. The volume represents the first multi-authored attempt to deal with the range of codes relevant to life, and to reveal the ubiquitous role of coding mechanisms in both organic and mental evolution.
Book Synopsis Key Transitions in Animal Evolution by : Rob Desalle
Download or read book Key Transitions in Animal Evolution written by Rob Desalle and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2010-12-07 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tackling one of the most difficult and delicate of the evolutionary questions, this challenging book summarizes the more recent results in phylogenetics and developmental biology that address the evolution of key innovations in metazoans. Divided into three sections, the first considers the phylogenetic issues involving this area of the tree of lif
Download or read book Nature's Magic written by Peter Corning and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-05 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature's Magic presents a bold vision of the evolutionary process from the Big Bang to the 21st century. Synergy of various kinds is not only a ubiquitous aspect of the natural world but it has also been a wellspring of creativity and the 'driver' of the broad evolutionary trend toward increased complexity, in nature and human societies alike. But in contrast with the many theories of emergence or complexity that rely on some underlying force or 'law', the 'Synergism Hypothesis', as Peter Corning calls it, is in essence an economic theory of biological complexity; it is fully consistent with mainstream evolutionary biology. Corning refers to it as Holistic Darwinism. Among the many important insights that are provided by this new paradigm, Corning presents a scenario in which the human species invented itself; synergistic, behavioral and technological innovations were the 'pacemakers' of our biological evolution. Synergy has also been the key to the evolution of complex modern societies, he concludes.
Book Synopsis The Cosmic Zoo by : Dirk Schulze-Makuch
Download or read book The Cosmic Zoo written by Dirk Schulze-Makuch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-18 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are humans a galactic oddity, or will complex life with human abilities develop on planets with environments that remain habitable for long enough? In a clear, jargon-free style, two leading researchers in the burgeoning field of astrobiology critically examine the major evolutionary steps that led us from the distant origins of life to the technologically advanced species we are today. Are the key events that took life from simple cells to astronauts unique occurrences that would be unlikely to occur on other planets? By focusing on what life does - it's functional abilities - rather than specific biochemistry or anatomy, the authors provide plausible answers to this question. Systematically exploring the various pathways that led to the complex biosphere we experience on planet Earth, they show that most of the steps along that path are likely to occur on any world hosting life, with only two exceptions: One is the origin of life itself – if this is a highly improbable event, then we live in a rather “empty universe”. However, if this isn’t the case, we inevitably live in a universe containing a myriad of planets hosting complex as well as microbial life - a “cosmic zoo”. The other unknown is the rise of technologically advanced beings, as exemplified on Earth by humans. Only one technological species has emerged in the roughly 4 billion years life has existed on Earth, and we don’t know of any other technological species elsewhere. If technological intelligence is a rare, almost unique feature of Earth's history, then there can be no visitors to the cosmic zoo other than ourselves. Schulze-Makuch and Bains take the reader through the history of life on Earth, laying out a consistent and straightforward framework for understanding why we should think that advanced, complex life exists on planets other than Earth. They provide a unique perspective on the question that puzzled the human species for centuries: are we alone?
