How Nature Works \ The science of self-organized criticality \ Per Bak
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1.Complexity and Criticality. 2.The Discovery of Self - Organized Criticality. 3.The sandpile paradigm. 4.Real Sandpiles and Landscape Formation. 5.Earthquakes, starquakes, and solar flares. 6.The ´game of life´: complexity is criticality. 7.Is life a self - organized critical phenomenon? 8.Mass Extinctions and Punctuated equilibria in a simple model of evolution9.Theory of the punctuated Equilibrium model 10.The brain. 11.On economics and traffic jams.
A general equilibrium theory has not been explicitly formulated for biology, but a picture of nature as being in ´balance´ often prevails Nature is supposed to be something that can, in principle, be conserved: this idea motivates environmentalists and conservationists And no wonder: in a human lifetime, the natural world changes very little, so equilibrium concepts may seem natural or intuitive. Bor if nature is in halance, how did we get here in the first place? Systems in balance or equilibrium, by definition, do not go anywhere. Does nature as we see it now (or as it was before we started´ polluting our environment) have any preferential status from an evolutionary point of view? Implicitly. the idea of nature being in balance is intimately related to the view that humans are at the center: our natural world is the ´right one.´