The study of virus disease emergence, whether it can be predicted and how it might be prevented, has become a major research topic in biomedicine. Here we show that efforts to predict disease emergence commonly conflate fundamentally different evolutionary and epidemiological time scales, and are likely to fail because of the enormous number of unsampled viruses that could conceivably emerge in...

Spatial variation in ecological systems can arise both as a consequence of variation in the quality and availability of resources and as an emergent property of spatially structured interactions. We used a spatially explicit model to simulate populations of herbivore hosts and their parasitoids in landscapes with different levels of variance in plant patch quality and different spatial arrangem...

Most multicellular organisms (either metazoan or plants) are grouped in contiguous spatial distributions, where they share genes and common environmental features. These aggregations—the size of which fluctuates in space and time— are called populations. Despite the fact that population dynamics has historically attracted the interest of many scientists, we are still far from understanding how ...

Social conventions are important for establishing and maintaining coordination in groups of agents, especially where there is no centralised control. As individuals interact, learn, and update their strategies, effective coordination can be achieved through the emergence of suitable conventions. In this paper we (i) show how the structure of a population affects convention emergence, (ii) demon...

In media-rich living spaces (like cities of the future, urban and rural living residencies, virtual societies, etc.), where thousands of people are overflooded with signals and messages at all levels of perception and modalities (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory) while engaging -actively or passivelyin the mechanisms of social life and society, the (i) dynamics of individual attention and t...

We study the evolution of technology as reflected in the US utility patents granted in the period 1976-2009. Previous work by Skusa and Bedau (2002) and Buchanan et al. (2010) used cumulative citation statistics to identify the inventions that most affect the course of evolution (those with the highest innovative impact). Here we examine the text of patent records (specifically, titles and abst...

We construct a growth model consistent with China’s economic transition: high output growth, sustained returns on capital, reallocation within the manufacturing sector, and a large trade surplus. Entrepreneurial firms use more productive technologies, but due to financial imperfections they must finance investments through internal savings. State-owned firms have low productivity but survive be...

The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was one of the first great civilizations in prehistory. This bronze age civilization flourished from the end of the fourth millennium BC. It disintegrated during the second millennium BC; despite much research effort, this decline is not well understood. Less research has been devoted to the emergence of the IVC, which shows continuous cultural precursors sin...

drome. Each illness is discussed in the context of disease-induced destruction and debilitation of the population, erosion of productivity and prosperity, fear-induced social destabilization, disruption of governance institutions, and the consequent erosion of state power relative to unaffected rival states. In Chapter 7, violent confl ict and war are shown to be disease amplifi ers through exa...