Tangled Nature: A model of emergent structure and temporal mode among co-evolving agents

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Tangled Nature model to explore how co-evolving agents create hierarchical structures with complex dynamics, including intermittent transitions and macro-level adaptations, linking microscopic evolution to macroscopic system behavior.

Contribution

It presents the Tangled Nature model as a framework for understanding emergent hierarchical structures and dynamics in co-evolving systems across biological and social domains.

Findings

System exhibits intermittent abrupt dynamics with meta-stable states.

Major upheavals follow log-Poisson time statistics.

The model links microscopic evolution to macro-level ecological and evolutionary patterns.

Abstract

Understanding systems level behaviour of many interacting agents is challenging in various ways, here we'll focus on the how the interaction between components can lead to hierarchical structures with different types of dynamics, or causations, at different levels. We use the Tangled Nature model to discuss the co-evolutionary aspects connecting the microscopic level of the individual to the macroscopic systems level. At the microscopic level the individual agent may undergo evolutionary changes due to mutations of strategies. The micro-dynamics always run at a constant rate. Nevertheless, the system's level dynamics exhibit a completely different type of intermittent abrupt dynamics where major upheavals keep throwing the system between meta-stable configurations. These dramatic transitions are described by a log-Poisson time statistics. The long time effect is a collectively adapted of the ecological network. We discuss the ecological and macroevolutionary consequences of the adaptive dynamics and briefly describe work using the Tangled Nature framework to analyse problems in economics, sociology, innovation and sustainability