Networking the complexity community since 1999
Author: cxdig
Explore the world of complexity science with NECSI’s Winter Session 2025. This specially designed course offers an in-depth understanding of complex systems, combining theoretical foundations with real-world applications. Whether you aim to deepen your expertise or begin a new intellectual journey, this program provides a comprehensive and academically rigorous exploration of the field.
Course Dates: 10-21 February 2025
Details at: necsi.edu
Sergey Gavrilets, Denis Tverskoi, Nianyi Wang, Xiaomin Wang, Juan Ozaita, Boyu Zhang, Angel Sánchez, and Giulia Andrighetto
Evolutionary Human Sciences , Volume 6 , 2024 , e50
Understanding and predicting human cooperative behaviour and belief dynamics remains a major challenge both from the scientific and practical perspectives. Because of the complexity and multiplicity of material, social and cognitive factors involved, both empirical and theoretical work tends to focus only on some snippets of the puzzle. Recently, a mathematical theory has been proposed that integrates material, social and cognitive aspects of behaviour and beliefs dynamics to explain how people make decisions in social dilemmas within heterogeneous groups. Here we apply this theory in two countries, China and Spain, through four long-term behavioural experiments utilising the Common Pool Resources game and the Collective Risk game. Our results show that material considerations carry the smallest weight in decision-making, while personal norms tend to be the most important factor. Empirical and normative expectations have intermediate weight in decision-making. Cognitive dissonance, social projection, logic constraints and cultural background play important roles in both decision-making and beliefs dynamics. At the individual level, we observe differences in the weights that people assign to factors involved in the decision-making and belief updating process. We identify different types of prosociality and rule-following associated with cultural differences, various channels for the effects of messaging, and culturally dependent interactions between sensitivity to messaging and conformity. Our results can put policy and information design on firmer ground, highlighting the need for interventions tailored to the situation at hand and to individual characteristics. Overall, this work demonstrates the theoretical and practical power of the theory in providing a more comprehensive understanding of human behaviour and beliefs.
Read the full article at: www.cambridge.org
Embark on a riveting journey through the study of social complexity with The Atlas of Social Complexity. Over three decades of scientific exploration unfold, unravelling the enigmatic threads that compose the fabric of society. From the dance of bacteria, to human-machine interactions, to the ever-shifting dynamics of power in social networks, this Atlas maps the evolution of our understanding of social complexity.
Brian Castellani’s and Lasse Gerrits’ Atlas is not merely retrospective. It is a compass pointing to uncharted territories: new directions for research and intellectual debate. With wit and insight, they invite the reader to ponder unanswered questions, taking them on a quest for alternative ways to understand the intricate complexities of societies.
The Atlas of Social Complexity is a thrilling expedition into the heart of what makes us human: from cognition, emotion, consciousness, the dynamics of human psychology, to social networks, collective behaviour, politics and governance, technology and planning, and the practice of social interventions. The Atlas also visits cross-cutting themes such as intersectionality, configurational complexity, and research methods.
Organised around six transdisciplinary themes and twenty-four topics the Atlas is an invaluable resource for all social science and complexity science scholars and students interested in new ideas and new ways of working in social complexity. It paves the way for the next generation of research in the study of social complexity.
Read the full article at: www.e-elgar.com
Guillermo Restrepo
Theory in Biosciences Volume 143, pages 237–251, (2024)
In an effort to expand the domain of mathematical chemistry and inspire research beyond the realms of graph theory and quantum chemistry, we explore five mathematical chemistry spaces and their interconnectedness. These spaces comprise the chemical space, which encompasses substances and reactions; the space of reaction conditions, spanning the physical and chemical aspects involved in chemical reactions; the space of reaction grammars, which encapsulates the rules for creating and breaking chemical bonds; the space of substance properties, covering all documented measurements regarding substances; and the space of substance representations, composed of the various ontologies for characterising substances.
Read the full article at: link.springer.com
Keith Farnsworth
Confusion over the terms ‘information’ and ‘causation’ in theoretical biology is a problem. Most of it results from misinterpreting cybernetic systems, or even worse, statistical metrics, for physical information phenomena. Over the past several years, our understanding of causation has developed to recognise it as the constraint on the action of physical forces by the spatiotemporal configuration of matter (or energy fields). That configuration has been identified with physically embodied information. This work begins by clarifying that. It then proceeds to demonstrate biologically relevant implications. First, by revealing the physical organisation that underlies synergistic information (an influential idea, especially in neuroscience). Then by applying a rigorous account of multi-level causation to positional information (in multicellular development) and ecological community structure. The approach presented reveals underlying physical structuring in cybernetic systems and clearly delineates the limits to their physical embodiment – e.g. showing how ecological communities can only be entities separate from their component parts in rather special circumstances. It also provides a clear argument for upward and downward causation, unveiling the mechanisms for both
Read the full article at: www.researchgate.net
Complexity Digest 