Concept Of Coevolution Research Articles

The co-evolution of technology and methods of standard setting: the case of the mobile phone industry

This paper applies the concept of co-evolution to technology, institutions, and industry structure in the mobile phone industry with a focus on technology and the institution/method of standard setting. The paper shows how changes in technology have caused the method of standard setting to come full circle. New switching technologies, in particular electronic switching, enabled a change from integral to modular problem solving and thus a change from quasi-vertical integration to open standard setting in the wireline telecommunications industry in the late 1970s and later in the mobile phone industry. Growth in those mobile phone markets that initially implemented an open standard setting process encouraged other countries to adopt similar types of standard setting where government agencies and firms were the mechanisms for this transmission of open standard setting methods. However, the latest technological change, the mobile Internet, requires integral problem solving and this has caused quasi-vertical integration to return in the form of service providers determining the mobile Internet standards and the specifications for the phones that support their mobile Internet services. A new set of firms is transmitting these methods of standard setting to the rest of the world.

GENLS: Co-evolutionary algorithm for nonlinear system of equations

In this paper, we present a new optimization system (GENLS), for nonlinear system of equations. Our approach has two characteristic features. Firstly, nonlinear system of equations is transformed into a nonlinear programming problem (NLP) with additional parameter ε to define initial precision of the system. That is, the objective is to reduce the violation of the constraints to an acceptable level (desired precision ε ∗) by minimizing a function that measures the maximum violation of the constraints. Secondly, efficient co-evolutionary algorithm is implemented for solving the resulting NLP, which combines concept of co-evolution, repairing procedure and elitist strategy. Finally, we report numerical results in order to establish the actual computational burden of the proposed method and to assess its performances with respect to classical approaches for solving nonlinear system of equations.

Novel Hantavirus Sequences in Shrew, Guinea

Novel Hantavirus Sequences in Shrew, Guinea

Socio-environmental co-evolution: some ideas for an analytical approach

A number of scholars, mainly in ecological economics, have been attracted to the concept of co-evolution for the analysis of socio-environmental change. Yet none has adopted and developed an applied analytical approach using an explicitly evolutionary framework. This paper discusses how other scholars in economics, technological studies, organization and political science have been using evolutionary explanations and draws some lessons for ecological economics. Evolutionary is a mode of explanation based on the selective retention of renewable variation. It accounts for phenomena of structural fit and change in a variety of domains. A co-evolutionary explanation, by extension, entails two or more evolving systems whose interaction affects their evolution. Socio-environmental co-evolution involves human systems (material practices and non-material ideas and values) and non-human systems (living and physical). The challenge then is how to develop case-specific, empirical applications that define and elaborate the variants that co-evolve and specify the processes of mutual selection. Applications could benefit from existing classifications and causal propositions in the natural and social sciences. Co-evolution is part of a larger analytical toolkit for looking at complex socio-environmental problems. Although distinct, there are strong synergies, complementarities and potential for combined uses between co-evolutionary, co-dynamic and complexity-based explanations.

Arenaviruses.

The Arenaviridae family contains 22 recognized virus species, each of them strongly associated with a rodent species (except Tacaribe virus which is associated with a species of bat), suggesting an ancient co-evolutionary process. Although the concept of co-evolution between rodents and arenaviruses is now largely accepted, little has been uncovered in terms of dating the phenomenon and the mechanisms of evolution, including speciation and pathogenicity. These questions are targeted in the present chapter. Old World arenaviruses are associated with the Eurasian rodents in the family Muridae. New World arenaviruses are associated with American rodents in the subfamily Sigmodontinae. The correlation between the rodent host phylogeny and the viruses suggests a long association and a co-evolutionary process. Furthermore, three distinct New World arenaviruses share a common ancestor, demonstrating a unique recombination event that probably occurred in that ancestor. This shows that recombination among arenaviruses of different lineages might occur in nature. Recombination and co-evolutionary adaptation appear as the main mechanisms of arenavirus evolution, generating a high degree of diversity. The diversity among rodent host reservoir and virus species and the potential to exchange genomic material provide a basis for the emergence of new viruses and the risk of these becoming pathogenic for humans.

IT-CEMOP: An iterative co-evolutionary algorithm for multiobjective optimization problem with nonlinear constraints

Over the past few years, researchers have developed a number of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). Although most studies concentrate on solving unconstrained optimization problems, there exit a few studies where MOEAs have been extended to solve constrained optimization problems. Most of them were based on penalty functions for handling nonlinear constraints by genetic algorithms. However the performance of these methods is highly problem-dependent, many methods require additional tuning of several parameters. In this paper, we present a new optimization algorithm, which is based on concept of co-evolution and repair algorithm for handling nonlinear constraints. The algorithm maintains a finite-sized archive of nondominated solutions which gets iteratively updated in the presence of new solutions based on the concept of ε-dominance. The use of ε-dominance also makes the algorithms practical by allowing a decision maker to control the resolution of the Pareto set approximation by choosing an appropriate ε value, which guarantees convergence and diversity. The results, provided by the proposed algorithm for six benchmark problems, are promising when compared with exiting well-known algorithms. Also, our results suggest that our algorithm is better applicable for solving real-world application problems.

A System Of Innovation? Integrated Water Resources Management Complemented With Co-Evolution: Examples From Palestinian And Israeli Joint Water Management

A concept of co-evolution is argued to complement Integrated Water Resource Management's gap in administrative integration. Co-evolution's complement to Integrated Water Resource Management is explored through issues surrounding joint water management arrangements between the Israelis and Palestinians in the late 1990s and early 21st century. How co-evolution contributes to such a water management approach highlights how we might think about what it means to encourage innovation. Conclusions of the article suggest co-evolution provides the language and description for the changing interactions and political environment and therefore provides a sharper conceptualization for administrative integration.

Co-Evolution of Firm Capabilities and Industry Competition: Investigating the Music Industry, 1877-1997

This paper proposes that rival firms not only search for new capabilities within their organization, but also for those that rest in their competitive environment. An integrated analysis of these search processes at both firm and industry levels of analysis shows how their interaction makes industries and firms co-evolve over time. To contribute to an enhanced understanding of the concept of co-evolution, a dynamic and integrative framework crossing meso and micro levels of analysis is constructed. This framework is applied to a longitudinal study of the music industry with a time-span of 120 years. The first part, a historical study, covers the period 1877-1990. The second part, a multiple-case study, covers the period 1990-1997. We conclude that search behaviour drives co-evolution through competitive dynamics among new entrants and incumbent firms and manifests itself in the simultaneous emergence of new business models and new organizational forms.

An Integrative Approach to the Study of Plant-Animal Interactions

I am tempted to give one more instance showing how plants and animals, remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations. (Darwin, 1859) Ecologists have been studying the interactions between plants and animals for as long as there have been ecologists. Charles Darwin studied the complex web of interactions even before he wrote his revolutionary book On the Origin of Species. Indeed, even his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was keenly aware of these interactions; he earned a small fortune for the family by writing poetry about the love lives of plants, accomplished through their relationships with animals (Gould, 1977). The study of plant-animal interactions has played a key role in the development of ecological theory. I give two examples here. Hairston et al. (1960) began with a particular view of the relationship between plants and their herbivores. This work inspired a generation of theory and empirical work on the structure of ecological communities, which helped define ideas of “top-down” and “bottom-up” effects. The concept of coevolution was first developed to describe the results of the relationship between particular plant species and the herbivorous insects that feed on them (Erlich and Raven, 1964). It has since been widely applied to describe the evolutionary results of a wide variety of ecological relationships between two or more biological entities (Futuyma and Slatkin, 1983). However, the study of plant-animal interactions has only recently begun to define itself as a distinct subdiscipline. I searched for publications from 1980 to the present listing plant-animal or plant-insect interactions as a keyword in Biological Abstracts (Fig. 1). In the early 1980s there were generally fewer than five such publications per year. That number has grown …

Globalization and Biology; The Role of Coevolution in the Process of Global Change

If we think of globalization as a process that has been under way for at least ten millennia, we can see the importance of biological forces in the process. The interconnectedness of biology and globalization is best captured by the concept of coevolution. By means of coevolution, a number of global life systems have emerged that incorporate human beings, a small number of plant and animal species domesticated for food and other purposes, and a rather larger set of microbial species. These latter have entered human populations as companions of our food supply (for example, influenza and smallpox) or as a consequence of other human activities that were part of globalization, such as war, trade, and long distance migration (for example, the bubonic plague and AIDS). The coevolution paradigm helps us predict the future development of epidemics, but in the case of the AIDS pandemic, now entering its third decade, the future is still unclear.

Evolution and ageing

The idea of this review is to connect the different models of evolution to those of biological ageing through Darwin's theory. We start with the Eigen model of quasispecies for microevolution, then introduce the Bak–Sneppen model for macroevolution and, finally, present the Penna model for biological ageing and some of its most important results. We also explore the concept of coevolution using this model.

From a ‘Sociology of Nature’ to Environmental Sociology: Beyond Social Construction1

This paper aims to provide some theoretical starting points for constructing a social science approach to environmental issues which goes beyond narrower forms of constructivism without dismissing the importance of interpretative sociology. An ecological understanding of society is compared with the notion of structuration and integrated into the concept of coevolution in order to shed light on the dynamic nature of socioenvironmental relations and move beyond the constructivist/realist dualism.

From a ‘Sociology of Nature’ to Environmental Sociology: Beyond Social Construction1

This paper aims to provide some theoretical starting points for constructing a social science approach to environmental issues which goes beyond narrower forms of constructivism without dismissing the importance of interpretative sociology. An ecological understanding of society is compared with the notion of structuration and integrated into the concept of coevolution in order to shed light on the dynamic nature of socioenvironmental relations and move beyond the constructivist/realist dualism.

Sustainable biosphere: critical overview of basic concept of sustainability

If we observe the evolution of different globalistic concepts from T. Malthus up to recent concepts such as the models of the Club of Rome and the sustainability suggested by the Brundtland commission, we can see that all the concepts are principally anthropocentric. For instance, the models of the Club of Rome, though differing by the levels of spatial and functional complexity, are first of all macro-economic models, including the biosphere processes as disturbances of global processes. On the other hand, we can consider the human society as a natural component of the biosphere. We can consider also the Biosphere (in accordance to Vernadsky V.I. (1926)(The Biosphere. Leningrad, Nauchtekhizdat (in Russian)) as an entity and study its reactions to human impact. Thus, we suggest the concept of coevolution of mankind and the biosphere as a further development and an alternative to sustainability. We try to show in this work how terms such as `limits to growth', `sustainable development' can be understood. We try to analyse a few technocratic illusions and reveal some physical contradictions contained in the basis of some globalistic concepts.

Lithinine moths on ferns: a phylogenetic study of insect-plant interactions

We examine host association patterns in pteridophagous moths of the tribe Lithinini (Lepidoptera: Geometridae). This represents the first study where the host associations of oligophagous, pteridophagous Lepidoptera are analysed in a phylogenetic context. We compare the observed phylogenetic patterns of lithinine moths and their hosts with the contrasting coevolutionary scenarios proposed by Mitter et ai, and discuss the support for various hypotheses relative to Thompson's concept of coevolution as ‘escape with radiation’, and the chemical facilitation model of Jermy. The patterns observed support a scenario where host shifting subsequent to a single colonization event has resulted in lack of strict concordance (i.e. parallel cladogenesis) between moth and fern phylogenies.

Economic Strategies for Coevolution: Timber and Butterflies in Mexico

The concept of coevolution is reviewed and a model is developed in an attempt to make the concept operational. The location, scale, and timing of economic activities in a buffer zone to a park or preserve are related to an index of biodiversity. Coevolution would occur if a trajectory of activities would in turn result in acceptable trajectories for net revenue and the index of biodiversity. The concept and model is used to evaluate alternative rates of timber harvest from the monarch butterfly preserves in Mexico.

Concepts of coevolution

The word coevolution has become a standard part of the lexicon of evolutionary biology. More than 1000 papers during the past decade have used coevolution in the title or abstract. Hundreds more have used the word in passing in the body of the paper. A half dozen books now include coevolution in the title. As usage of coevolution has increased, so have the views on the processes and mechanisms of coevolutionary change. The problem now is to understand the ecological and genetic conditions that favor different modes and outcomes of coevolution.

Pollen retention following natural self pollination in peach, almond, and peach × almond hybrids

Retention of pollen grains following natural self-pollination was evaluated in 15 cultivars (cvs.) of almond, 4 peach and 2 nectarine cvs., and 37 interspecific peach × almond hybrids compared to 7 almond seedlings. The level of pollen retention was presumed to reflect and integrate the degree of homogamy, the amount of pollen produced by the flower, the extent of anther-stigma contact during anthesis, and the level of pollen germination. Pollen retention averaged 5 times greater in the peach and nectarine cvs. than in the almond cvs. The greater pollen retention, characteristic of the peach, was dominant in expression in the interspecific F1 hybrids over the lower levels of pollen retention, characteristic of the almond. Thus, gametophytic self-incompatibility is not the only trait supporting outcrossing in the almond. Our data are consistent with the concept of co-evolution of floral traits relating to different breeding strategies. The level of pollen retention could often be anticipated at anthesis on the basis of blossom phenotype. That is, stigma-anther contact was observed frequently in the blossoms of peach, nectarine, and the peach × almond F1 hybrids, but only infrequently in almond.