Interesting Somehow Related Works

Abstract: Food is an essential part of civilization, with a scope that ranges from the biological to the economic and cultural levels. Here, we study the statistics of ingredients and recipes taken from Brazilian, British, French and Medieval cookery books. We find universal distributions with scale invariant behaviour. We propose a copy-mutate process to model culinary evolution that fits our empirical data very well. We find a cultural ‘founder effect’ produced by the non-equilibrium dynamics of the model. Both the invariant and idiosyncratic aspects of culture are accounted for by our model, which may have applications in other kinds of evolutionary processes.

Abstract: I am convinced that the nations and people who master the new sciences of complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century. - Heinz Pagels [50]

When I hear the word “complexity,” I don't exactly reach for my hammer, but I suspect my eyes narrow. It has the dangerous allure of an incantation, threatening to acquire the same blithe explanatory role that “adaptation” once did in biology. - Philip Ball [1]

Abstract: I review the purported opposition between computational and dynamical approaches in cognitive science. I argue that both computational and dynamical notions will be necessary for a full explanatory account of cognition, and give a perspective on how recent research in complex systems can lead to a much needed rapprochement between computational and dynamical styles of explanation