A celebrated and controversial hypothesis suggests that some biological systems—parts,
aspects, or groups of them—may extract important functional benefits from operating at the …

Introduced by the late Per Bak and his colleagues, self-organized criticality (SOC) has been
one of the most stimulating concepts to come out of statistical mechanics and condensed …

When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a
power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's …

and acknowledgments Self-organized criticality is a new way of viewing nature. The basic
picture is one where nature is perpetually out of balance, but organized in a poised state-the …

The world's most revered and eloquent interpreter of evolutionary ideas offers here a work of
explanatory force unprecedented in our time—a landmark publication, both for its historical …

Ecosystems are prototypical examples of complex adaptive systems, in which patterns at
higher levels emerge from localized interactions and selection processes acting at lower …

All human beings have spontaneous needs for happiness, self-understanding, and love. In
Feeling Good: The Science of Well Being, psychiatrist Robert Cloninger describes a way to …

The preface is that part of a book which is written last, placed? rst, and read least. Alfred J.
Lotka Elements of Physical Biology Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Company 1925 The …

Abstract The Modern Synthesis (MS) is the current paradigm in evolutionary biology. It was
actually built by expanding on the conceptual foundations laid out by its predecessors …

Can physics be an appropriate framework for the understanding of ecological science? Most
ecologists would probably agree that there is little relation between the complexity of natural …