The Rise and Fall of Evolutionary Sand Castles

Explore the complex world of evolutionary interdependence in this 47-minute seminar from the Santa Fe Institute. Delve into the formation of interconnected systems within organisms, social populations, and ecological settings. Examine how neutral drift and selection shape these structures and their vulnerabilities to catastrophic failures. Investigate physical and phenomenological evolutionary models of biological interdependence, and learn to predict when and how biological and ecological structures may collapse. Discover how failure patterns can reveal local and global properties of interdependence structures. Conclude by exploring the inverse problem of inferring interdependence network topologies from component failure times. Cover topics including neutral constructivism, evolution of cooperation, specialized organs, and the effects of space and flow on group formation.