Pluralism is the coexistence of equivalent theoretical frameworks, either because they are historically entrenched or because they achieve separate insights by viewing the same process in different ways. A recent article by West et al. [Journal of Evolutionary Biology (2007) vol. 20, 415-432] attempts to classify the many equivalent frameworks that have been developed to study the evolution of ...

Program Thursday, October 29 10:00 – 10:20 Opening addresses by Vice-Rector Prof. Dr. Heinz Faßmann and by Dean Prof. Dr. Harald Rindler 10:20 – 11:15 Peter Schuster: “Modeling cooperation – From molecules to man” 11:15 – 12:10 Martin Nowak: “Natural cooperation” 12:10 – 14:00 Lunch 14:00 – 14:55 Sebastian Schreiber: "Fitness covariances and coexistence of interacting, structured populations" 1...

Coexistence of cooperators and defectors is common in nature, yet the evolutionary origin of such social diversification is unclear. Many models have been studied on the basis of the assumption that benefits of cooperative acts only accrue to others. Here, we analyze the continuous snowdrift game, in which cooperative investments are costly but yield benefits to others as well as to the coopera...

We study the stochastic dynamics of coupled states with transition probabilities depending on local persistence, this is, the time since a state has changed. When the system has a preference to adopt older states the system orders quickly due to the dominance of old states. When preference for new states prevails, the system can show coexistence of states or synchronized collective behavior res...

This article seeks to determine the extent to which endogenous consumer-resource cycles can contribute to the coexistence of competing consumer species. It begins with a numerical analysis of a simple model proposed by Armstrong and McGehee. This model has a single resource and two consumers, one with a linear functional response and one with a saturating response. Coexistence of the two consum...

Modular structure is ubiquitous among real-world networks from related proteins to social groups. Here we analyze the modular organization of brain networks at a large-scale (voxel level) extracted from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals. By using a random walk-based method, we unveil the modularity of brain-webs, and show modules with a spatial distribution that matches anato...

Two competing consumer species may coexist using a single homogeneous resource when the more efficient consumer--the one having the lowest equilibrium resource density--has a more nonlinear functional response that generates consumer-resource cycles. We extend this model of nonequilibrium coexistence, as proposed by Armstrong and McGehee, by putting the interaction into a spatial context using ...

Much of the work on species coexistence has focused on the presence or absence of single mechanisms. Most theoretical frameworks, however, do not allow one to measure the strength of coexistence mechanisms, and so it has been difficult to determine the relative importance of each mechanism when multiple mechanisms are present. We present a model inspired by the California red scale system, in w...

We are concerned with the utility of social laws in a computational environment laws which guarantee the successful coexistence of multi ple programs and programmers In this paper we are interested in the o line design of social laws where we as designers must decide ahead of time on useful social laws In the rst part of this paper we sug gest the use of social laws in the domain of mobile robo...