1. Self-Organized Criticality Cellular Automata Boids Oscillating Reactions

2. The Bak-Sneppen evolutionary model is an “ecosystem” in which the fitness of each “species” changes because of its relationships with other “species”, following two simple rules

5. We do not expect random processes to result in an organized or meaningful outcome. Random means all events are independent of each other, without goal or purpose.

6. P Q

7. July 5, 2012, 9:15 pm The Fires This Time By TIMOTHY EGAN CASCADE, Colo. - Nature makes a mockery of our vanity. We live in flood and fire zones, nurture stately oaks and take shade under pines holding the best air of the Rocky Mountains. We plant villas next to sandstone spires called the Garden of the Gods, and McMansions in Virginia stocked with people who have the world at their fingertips. called Then, with a clap, a boom and a roar, fire marches through a subdivision on a conveyance of 60 mile an hour winds. A platoon of thunderstorms so loaded with energy it has its own category name - derecho - cuts a swath from east of Chicago to the Atlantic. The pines flame and hiss, shooting sparks on the house next door, a fortress no more. The oaks tumble and crush roofs. Almost 350 homes burn to the ground, and nearly 5 million people lose all electricity in sweltering heat. Lobbyists and congressmen curse at mute cellphones and sweat through their seersucker. The powerful are powerless. So it went the first 10 days of summer, another extraordinary chapter in a weather year of living dangerously. At one point, 113 million Americans were under an extreme heat advisory. It was 109 degrees in Nashville, 104 in Washington, D.C., and much of the West was aflame.

8. 1. In a complex system everything is connected with everything else. Nothing exists in isolation from the rest, sitting in a protected niche, independent and self-sufficient. 2. In a complex system no one can be completely safe, with complete control over their fate. Everyone has the potential to be an innocent victim since there is no way one can fully protect oneself from external actions.

9. "The essential questions of a discipline are usually specified by the first competent thinkers to enter it. The intense professional activity of later centuries can often be identified as so many variations on a set of themes. The same old questions are endlessly debated." Stephen Jay Gould 1941-2002

10. "The essential questions of a discipline are usually specified by the first competent thinkers to enter it. The intense professional activity of later centuries can often be identified as so many variations on a set of themes. The same old questions are endlessly debated." Stephen Jay Gould Does time have an arrow specified by some vectorial property of the organic world (increasing complexity of structure, or numbers of species, e.g.) No question received more discussion during the... early to mid- nineteenth century. 1941-2002 The Eternal Metaphors

11. "The essential questions of a discipline are usually specified by the first competent thinkers to enter it. The intense professional activity of later centuries can often be identified as so many variations on a set of themes. The same old questions are endlessly debated." Stephen Jay Gould More specifically, how are life and the earth related? Does the external environment and its alterations set the course of change, or does change arise from some independent and internal dynamic within organisms themselves? 1941-2002 The Eternal Metaphors

12. "The essential questions of a discipline are usually specified by the first competent thinkers to enter it. The intense professional activity of later centuries can often be identified as so many variations on a set of themes. The same old questions are endlessly debated." Stephen Jay Gould Does it proceed gradually in a continuous and stately fashion, or is it episodic? 1941-2002 The Eternal Metaphors

13. "The essential questions of a discipline are usually specified by the first competent thinkers to enter it. The intense professional activity of later centuries can often be identified as so many variations on a set of themes. The same old questions are endlessly debated." Stephen Jay Gould Does it proceed gradually in a continuous and stately fashion, or is it episodic? 1941-2002 What does Bak-Sneppen say about this?

14. Darwin of gradual evolutionary change

15. Does evolution proceed gradually in a continuous and stately fashion, or is it episodic? 1941-2002 Eldredge, N., & Gould, S. J. 1972. Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism. In: Models In Paleobiology (Ed. by T. J. M. Schopf). “Evidence from the fossil record shows no evidence of gradual evolutionary change. Rather species appear fully developed, and remain unchanged until they go extinct millions of years later.”

16. Evolutionary Change Time Gradual change through time = anagenesis Stasis: no change through time Abrupt appearance of new species, followed by stasis = cladogenesis

17. Dynamics of the Bak-Sneppen Evolutionary Model Activity pattern for the Bak-Sneppen model. Time begins at an arbitrary time after the model has self-organized at the critical state near the 0.66 threshold. Species are arranged along the horizontal axis (from -20 to +20). Each circle indicates a time a given species undergoes a mutation. For example, at about time 2000 species -7 through +7 are undergoing mutations; by time 4000 activity has shifted to -20 to -10. That is, there is an avalanche in that portion of the ecosystem. As the avalanches move to other species the activity circles move to those other species, and species that are not mutating do not have activity circles for that time span.

18. Dynamics of the Bak-Sneppen Evolutionary Model Graph showing the climb of the threshold fitness for the whole ecosystem with time. Threshold fitness is the highest fitness the least fit species has attained. A step up to a new threshold occurs only when all species climb above the old threshold, thus ending an avalanche. As the graph shows this takes progressively more time as the threshold fitness rises. Note that the rise in ecosystem fitness is punctuational, or behaves like a Self Organized Critical sandpile.

19. Dynamics of the Bak-Sneppen Evolutionary Model The Devil's staircase shows the accumulated activity of one species. Horizontal lines are times of stasis. Vertical jumps are mutations; note these come in bundles over short time intervals (are punctuational). In reality there are many more mutation steps than shown. One can think of the number of changes as representing the amount of physical change in the animal, such as size. The Self Organized Criticality (aka "punctuated equil-ibrium“) nature of the curve is evident in the long times of stasis followed by jumps in activity.

20. 3. Biological systems evolve (avalanche) punctuationally – in spurts – that follow a power law. Evolution is not gradual change over long periods of time.

21. "Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. 'Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.'" 4. That is, an improvement in one species leads to improvement in interacting species, which is a positive feedback driving the system to keep moving in the direction of increasing fitness for each species.

24. For the first time, the game does something it has long pretended to do: SimCity simulates discrete urban behavior, tracking how every person and every object interacts. “We now have every car and every person and every garbage truck and every criminal represented by an autonomous agent in the environment,” says Quigley, who served as the creative and art director on the new game. “Then we give each of them simple rules about how they should behave—so a criminal goes around looking for a place to commit crime, and a policeman goes about looking for places where crimes are being committed. What you get is a city built out of the emergent interactions between all these agents.”

25. Is life, is evolution, driven by competition, or cooperation?