Complex adaptive systems: Exploring the known, the unknown and the unknowable

By Simon A. Levin. 2002

406 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The study of complex adaptive systems, from cells to societies, is a study of the interplay among processes operating at diverse scales of space, time and organizational complexity. The key to such a study is an understanding of the interrelationships between microscopic processes and macroscopic patterns, and the evolutionary forces that shape systems. In particular, for ecosystems and socioeconomic systems, much interest is focused on broad scale features such as diversity and resiliency, while evolution operates most powerfully at the level of individual agents. Understanding the evolution and development of complex adaptive systems thus involves understanding how cooperation, coalitions and networks of interaction emerge from individual behaviors and feed back to influence those behaviors. In this paper, some of the mathematical challenges are discussed.

Subfields: Genetics, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b84865f975b2143f629699ee35f9b5865482329d

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In Genetics

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Citations in the corpus

Social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystems: Complementary or disjoint phenomena? (2017, background): “Scholars have argued that entrepreneurial ecosystems are best conceptualized as complex systems, that is, systems in which the macro-level behaviors of the system both influence and emerge from interactions among the agents comprising the system (Levin, 2002, Roundy et al., 2016).”
Network science: A Review Focused on Tourism (2010, neutral): “Instead, many authors characterize a system as complex and adaptive by listing the properties that these systems exhibit (see for example Cilliers 1998; Levin 2003; Ottino 2004).”
Chaos and pattern formation in a spatial tritrophic food chain (2006, background): “proven inadequate in several situations to describe the complexity of phenomena occurring in natural populations, as demonstrated early by Fisher (1937) and Skellam (1951) and more recently by several authors (e.g., Durrett and Levin, 1994; Levin and Pacala, 1997; Dieckmann et al., 2000; Pascual et ”
Answering Schrödinger's question: A free-energy formulation (2017, neutral): “To date, research in EST has focused on complex adaptive systems—such as the brain [19,20], social systems [21], and the biosphere [22]—which adapt to the environment through an autonomous process of selection that recruits the outcomes of locally interacting components—within that system—to select ”
Improving tourism destination governance: a complexity science approach (2010, background): “No common consensus exists, but, following many scholars such as Levin (2003), a system can be defined complex when it comprises a (normally rather large) number of elements that are interacting in an interdependent way.”
The importance of social drivers in the resilient provision of ecosystem services (2011, background): “Here, domestic legislative committees may wield disproportionate amounts of power in determining whether or not a state ratifies international treaties or attains agreed-upon goals (Barrett, 2003; Levin, 2010).”
From simplistic to complex systems in economics (2005, background): “Levin (2003) defines such systems in terms of three”
Potential movement of fish and shellfish stocks from the sub-Arctic to the Arctic Ocean (2013, background): “Promote novel approach to ecosystem modeling Ecosystems that can be described as ‘complex adaptive systems’ (CAS; Levin, 1998, 2002) and possess an extremely high degree of complexity, are difficult to observe, display non-linear behavior with abrupt changes (also called regime shifts) and are…”
Network structure and institutional complexity in an ecology of water management games (2014, background): “The ensuing constellation of actors, issues, and institutions constitutes a complex adaptive system (Levin 1998, 2002) that evolves over time in a particular geographic region.”
Resilience, Robustness, and Marine Ecosystem-based Management (2008, background): “Indeed, they are complex adaptive systems in which the dynamics of interactions at small scales percolate up to shape macroscopic system dynamics, which then feed back to influence the smaller scales (Levin 1998,2003).”