Co-Evolution Dynamics--fittness races, sexuality invention competitions, co-evolving fitness landscapes

Petrova et al 2012 DMM

by Eduardo Moreno Lampaya

The Red Queen effect: Competitive actions and firm performance

by Pamela Derfus

Manufacturing strategy -- understanding the fitness landscape.

by Ian McCarthy

McCarthy I.P. 2004. Manufacturing Strategy -- Understanding the Fitness Landscape. International Journal of Operations and Production Management, 24(2): 124-150.

This theoretical paper presents, extends and integrates a number of systems and evolutionary concepts, to demonstrate... more This theoretical paper presents, extends and integrates a number of systems and evolutionary concepts, to demonstrate their relevance to manufacturing strategy formulation. Specifically it concentrates on fitness landscape theory as an approach for visually mapping the strategic options a manufacturing firm could pursue. It examines how this theory relates to manufacturing competitiveness and strategy and proposes a definition and model of manufacturing fitness. In accordance with fitness landscape theory, a complex systems perspective is adopted to view manufacturing forms. It is argued that manufacturing forms are a specific type of complex system ± a complex adaptive system ± and that by developing and applying fitness landscape theory it is possible to create models to better understand and visualise how to search and select various combinations of capabilities.

Darwinian Populations

by Emanuele Serrelli

Serrelli E (2011). Darwinian Populations. Pikaia il portale dell'evoluzione (http://www.pikaia.eu), Jan 19, 2011. ISSN 1827-8647 http://boa.unimib.it/handle/10281/22165

Presentation of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009), winner of the... more Presentation of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009), winner of the prestigious Lakatos Award for outstanding contributions to philosophy of science.

References:
Godfrey-Smith P (2009). Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection. New York: Oxford University Press.
Okasha S (2006). Evolution and the Levels of Selection. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Two other reviews of Godfrey-Smith's book:
Pigliucci M (2009.08.15). Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Plutynski A (2010). Philosophical Books, 51(2), pp.83-101.

Fitness Landscapes and Surfaces of Selective Value

by Emanuele Serrelli

Serrelli E (2010). Fitness Landscapes and Surfaces of Selective Value. SIBE-ISEB (Italian Society of Evolutionary Biology) IV Congress, Milano, Italy September 2nd-4th.

The notion of “fitness landscapes” was presented by Sewall Wright in 1932. Its influence in evolutionary biology was... more The notion of “fitness landscapes” was presented by Sewall Wright in 1932. Its influence in evolutionary biology was extensive in several directions up to the present day. One direction consists in studies that built “fitness landscapes” although, according to my analysis, they employed only a part of Wright’s ideas - i.e. the one concerning “surfaces of selective value” (cf. Wright 1988) - focusing on one or few genetic or phenotypic traits of the studied systems. The model Wright fostered in 1932 was about the entire genotypic space of a Mendelian population, characterized by huge dimensionality. The lack of formal tools and computational power have prevented its actual construction, but understanding the original idea and how it differs from the realized models seems useful, all the most after the recent proposal by Sergey Gavrilets (e.g. Gavrilets 1997; 2004) of revising the overall structure of the genotype space. Understanding crucial differences is necessary here as well: for example, the newly proposed diagrams - namely, nearly flat, holey surfaces - do not represent the whole genotypic space, but the existence and properties of “nearly neutral networks” within it. The latter are fundamental for building particular speciation models called “spontaneous clusterization” (Gavrilets 2010). I will present, on the one hand, Wright’s primal proposal and the revision advanced by Gavrilets, on the other hand, the fruitful “surface of selective value” method, that consists in (1) representing genetic or phenotypic variants as points that are distributed on a bi-dimensional surface, so that the distance between points be proportional to the “reachability” between variants; (2) extruding such a surface along a third, orthogonal dimension that represents the considered variants’ fitness. The method aids the study of the role of fitness and other factors in evolutionary dynamics.

Rediscovering Darwin: Evolutionary Theory in Archaeological Explanation.

by Michael Barton

1997 C. Michael Barton & G.A. Clark (editors). Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, no. 7, Washington, D.C

The emergence of human uniqueness: the evolution of characters underlying behavioral modernity

by Michael Barton

2009 Kim Hill, C. Michael Barton, & Magdalena Hurtado.
Evolutionary Anthropology, 18(5): 187-200.

Although scientists are aware that humans share the same biological heritage as do all other organisms on the planet,... more Although scientists are aware that humans share the same biological heritage as do all other organisms on the planet, the reliance of Homo sapiens on culture and cooperation has resulted in what can best be described as “a spectacular evolutionary anomaly.”1:11 The extra-somatic adaptations, technological dominance, and success of our species in colonizing every terrestrial habitat have no parallel.2 Moreover, Homo sapiens accounts for about eight times as much biomass as do all other terrestrial wild vertebrates combined,3 an amount equivalent to the biomass of all 14,000+ species of ants,4 the most successful terrestrial invertebrates. Human societies are complex, with more specialized economic niches in the United States than the total number of mammalian species on the planet.5 While some might suggest that only post-industrial humans achieved stunning biological success, data suggest that humans living as hunter-gatherers would have attained a world population of more than 70 million individuals6 and a total biomass greater than that of any other large vertebrate on the planet if agriculture had not been repeatedly invented as they spread.

General fitness, transmission, and human behavioral systems

by Michael Barton

2008 C. Michael Barton. In Cultural Transmission, edited by M.J. O’Brien, pp. 112-119. Society for American Archaeology Press, Washington.

Links between global taxonomic diversity, ecological diversity and the expansion of vertebrates on land

by Sarda Sahney

Sahney, S., Benton, M.J. and Paul A. Ferry 2010. Links between global taxonomic diversity, ecological diversity and the expansion of vertebrates on land. Biology Letters. 6:544-547

Tetrapod biodiversity today is great; over the past 400 Myr since vertebrates moved onto land, global tetrapod... more Tetrapod biodiversity today is great; over the past 400 Myr since vertebrates moved onto land, global tetrapod diversity has risen exponentially, punctuated by losses during major extinctions. There are links between the total global diversity of tetrapods and the diversity of their ecological roles, yet no one fully understands the interplay of these two aspects of biodiversity and a numerical analysis of this relationship has not so far been undertaken. Here we show that the global taxonomic and ecological diversity of tetrapods are closely linked. Throughout geological time, patterns of global diversity of tetrapod families show 97 per cent correlation with ecological modes. Global taxonomic and ecological diversity of this group correlates closely with the dominant classes of tetrapods (amphibians in the Palaeozoic, reptiles in the Mesozoic, birds and mammals in the Cenozoic). These groups have driven ecological diversity by expansion and contraction of occupied ecospace, rather than by direct competition within existing ecospace and each group has used ecospace at a greater rate than their predecessors.