The expansion of information in ecological systems: Emergence as a quantifiable state
Authored by Adam G Marsh, Yujing Zeng, Javier Garcia-Frias
Date Published: 2006
DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoinf.2005.10.003
Sponsors:
United States National Science Foundation (NSF)
Platforms:
StarLogo
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Mathematical description
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
Although the term `emergence' has received wide attention in the
literature, most of this attention has been focused on epistemological
discussions about the nature of what might be considered emergent
behavior in self-organizing systems. For the concept of emergence to
have any great utility for biologists, it must (1) be perceptible as a
physical, quantitative property rather than just a philosophical one;
(2) have a quantitative definition applicable to all levels of
biological organization; and (3) be an essential component of biological
system performance or evolution. Using an independent, cellular
population model (running in the StarLogo system), we have developed a
mutual information calculation to measure the information expansion when
considering the interactions between a population of herbivores and an
environment in comparison to the interactions between the individual
herbivores and that environment. In self-organizing biological systems, the collective action of massively parallel units generates a greater
potential complexity in the information processing capacity of the
`whole' system relative to the `individual' parts, and as such, there is
a demonstrable increase in mutual information content. From this
perspective, we consider emergence to exist as a simple information
expansion that is a default behavior of any system with multiple, component parts governed by a simple, probabilistic rule set. It is not
a first principle of self-organizing biological systems, but rather a
collective behavior that can be quantitatively described in practical
terms for experimental biologists. With a quantitative formulation, the
concept of emergence may become a,useful information statistic in
assessing the structure of biological systems. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V.
All rights reserved.
Tags
individual-based models
Evolution
behavior
Dynamics
networks
Organization
Complex-systems
Communities
Principle
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