Simon A. Levin – Princeton University
Wednesday, July 19, 10:45AM EDT (Zoom meeting starts at 10:30 EDT)
Ecosystems and the Biosphere as Complex Adaptive Systems: Scaling, collective phenomena and governance
Phil Anderson, in a landmark essay, highlighted the challenges in understanding the emergent properties of what were later termed “complex adaptive systems,” and the need to go beyond reductionistic approaches, themes later echoed in another brilliant essay, by Francois Jacob, approaching the challenge through a very different lens. No problem facing us better exemplifies these issues than that of achieving a sustainable future for humanity.
The continual increase in the human population, magnified by increasing per capita demands on Earth's limited resources, raise the urgent mandate of understanding the degree to which these patterns are sustainable. The scientific challenges posed by this simply stated goal are enormous, and cross disciplines. What measures of human welfare should be at the core of definitions of sustainability, and how do we discount the future and deal with problems of intra-generational and inter-generational equity? How do environmental and socioeconomic systems become organized as complex adaptive systems, and what are the implications for dealing with public goods at scales from the local to the global? How does the
increasing interconnectedness of coupled natural and human systems affect the robustness of aspects of importance to us, and what are the implications for management. What is the role of social norms, and how do we achieve cooperation at the global level? All of these issues have parallels in disciplines ranging from statistical mechanics to evolutionary biology, and this lecture will explore what lessons can be learned from other disciplines for addressing the problems posed by the need to achieve a sustainable future.