Who Replaces Whom? Local versus Non-local Replacement in Social and Evolutionary Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper examines how different mechanisms of individual replacement influence the emergence of adaptation and speciation in population genetics and social dynamics models, highlighting the importance of model constraints.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the way replacement mechanisms are modeled determines whether adaptation or speciation occurs, emphasizing the role of natural selection in these processes.

Findings

Replacement constraints affect adaptation and speciation outcomes

Natural selection influences the interplay between evolution and self-organization

Different modeling approaches yield distinct emergent behaviors

Abstract

In this paper, we inspect well-known population genetics and social dynamics models. In these models, interacting individuals, while participating in a self-organizing process, give rise to the emergence of complex behaviors and patterns. While one main focus in population genetics is on the adaptive behavior of a population, social dynamics is more often concerned with the splitting of a connected array of individuals into a state of global polarization, that is, the emergence of speciation. Applying computational and mathematical tools we show that the way the mechanisms of selection, interaction and replacement are constrained and combined in the modeling have an important bearing on both adaptation and the emergence of speciation. Differently (un)constraining the mechanism of individual replacement provides the conditions required for either speciation or adaptation, since these features appear as two opposing phenomena, not achieved by one and the same model. Even though natural selection, operating as an external, environmental mechanism, is neither necessary nor sufficient for the creation of speciation, our modeling exercises highlight the important role played by natural selection in the interplay of the evolutionary and the self-organization modeling methodologies.