The fitness consequences of animal personalities (also known as behavioural syndromes) have recently been studied in several solitary species. However, the adaptive significance of collective personalities in social insects and especially of behavioural...

Figure 1. The association football field and the locations of the 20 outfield players, area of play, sub-areas of play in one exemplar moment. Cite as: L. Vilar, D. Araújo, K. Davids, Y. Bar-Yam, Science of Winning Soccer:...

This is Jerry McManus' follow-up to his very insightful article, Modeling Collective Behavior, and it delves into the scientific meaning of a commonly-used, but sometimes misunderstood term of complex systems theory - "tipping point". I have briefly add...

Concepts used in the scientific study of complex systems have become so widespread that their use and abuse has led to ambiguity and confusion in their meaning. In this paper we use information theory to provide abstract and concise measures of complexi...

Biochemists have long imagined that autocatalytic sets can explain the origin of life. Now a new mathematical approach to these sets has even broader implications.   One of the most puzzling questions about the origin of life is how the rich chemical la...

The term property graph has come to denote an attributed, multi-relational graph. That is, a graph where the edges are labeled and both vertices and edges can have any number of key/value properties associated with them. An example of a property graph w...

NECSI's Summer and Winter Schools offer two intensive week-long courses. The courses consist of lecture and supervised group projects. Though the second week builds on material covered in the previous week, CX201 is not a...

Cooperation leads to intelligence. In fact, researchers believe that intelligence in our species and others ? correlated with the size of a brain?s neural network ? may have been an adaptation for tool use, for social learning, and for the accumulation...

Understanding cooperation in animal social groups remains a significant challenge for evolutionary theory. Observed behaviours that benefit others but incur some cost appear incompatible with classical notions of natural selection; however, these behavi...

Fundamentally people behave in a social and rather compassionate and 'good' way rather than aggressively, even without specified rules.