Visiting Speaker: David Batten
An exciting special seminar hosted by the ARC
Centre for Complex Systems:
Afternoon tea now provided BEFORE the seminar.
Date: Monday, 17th October
Afternoon Tea: 3:00pm Tea Room 78-423
Seminar Time: 4:00pm
Location: 78-420, General Purposes south
Speaker: David F. Batten*
CSIRO
Melbourne, Australia
Title: Agency and the Evolution of
Diversity
Abstract:
According to Stuart Kauffman, a striking
weakness of current economic theory
is that it has no convincing account of the
persistent, secular explosion of
diversity of goods, services and ways of making
a living. Jobs and job
holders jointly coevolve into existence in an
ever-expanding web of diverse
complexity. So do products, markets and
artefacts. This persistent novelty
highlights the fact that both the biosphere and
the econosphere "are
expressions of the immense creativity of the
universe, and in particular, of
autonomous agents that are exapting molecularly,
morphologically and
technologically in untold, unforetellable ways
persistently into the
adjacent possible." [Kauffman (2000), p.212]
George Basalla (1988), for one, questions
whether the explosive variety that
we see in the world is simply a result of
wilful, conscious planning by
humans to satisfy their own needs. He pursues
the analogy between the
evolution of living organisms and human
artefacts in detail. For example, he
compares the number of different species -
estimated at 1.5 million - with
the number of different patents (representing
artefacts). About 4.7 million
patents were registered in the USA alone from
1790 to 1980. Is technological
evolution a discrete process of inventions with
great names attached to
each, or is it a continuous, collectively social
process? Are all living
and non-living entities subject to the same
natural law (meaning that
economics should really be a branch of biology)?
Do we only need Universal
Darwinism to explain this inexorable march
towards greater diversity? Or
can complexity theory (e.g. the theory of
self-organization) add something
that evolutionary theory alone still lacks?
In this talk, I shall address the above
questions by discussing the issue of
autonomous agents and if/how the evolution of
diversity can be modelled.
Special attention will be devoted to the role of
evolutionary graph theory,
cellular automata, agent-based simulation and
other methods drawn from the
complexity sciences. This topic will be
the subject of a 1-day Symposium at
the University of Melbourne on 16 December 2005,
immediately after the
MODSIM Congress.
* The author is currently Coordinator of (1)
CSIRO's Agent-Based Modelling
Working Group and (2) COSNet Theme 5 (Cellular
Automata, Agent-Based
Modelling and Simulation).