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.

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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.

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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

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KAROLINE WIESNER, JYOTSNA PURI, and ANDREAS REUMANN

Advances in Complex SystemsVol. 27, No. 06, 2440004 (2024)

As governments and multilateral institutions launch projects and programs to support climate change mitigation and adaptation, the challenge lies in determining their effectiveness. The high complexity of climate-change programs often makes it difficult to determine their effectiveness through standard monitoring and evaluation procedures. ‘complexity-aware monitoring’ is a qualitative approach to monitoring, recently introduced by international development programs. This increasing awareness of complexity in the evaluation sector opens up a window of opportunity for complexity science to support climate change mitigation and adaptation programs. This paper’s contribution is a hands-on methodology for live monitoring and evaluation of development programs. The methodology is rooted in existing literature on social–ecological systems, as pioneered by Ostrom, and in quantitative methods from complexity science. To illustrate the methodology, an existing climate mitigation project in Madagascar, funded, monitored and evaluated by the Green Climate Fund, is discussed.

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