Co Evolution

Because technologies and morals co-evolve, modern societies have to become adept at techno-moral learning, or the art of 'reflective' co-evolution. Developing this skill requires a better understanding of the various ways technology and morality challenge each other. With ...

Hybrid-electric vehicles have experienced a significant rate of growth in the last 10 years. This is remarkable, since the automotive sector is typically averse to the more radical technological change of engines. The internal combustion engine has been around for more than 100 years after all.In this paper we describe and explain the emergence of electric engines in the automobile market after 1990. We explicate the role of techno-economic mechanisms alongside social and regulatory mechanisms (including the social meaning of an engine). The co-evolutionary analysis is novel in the integrated conception of actor perspectives, feedback effects and competition between products. We find three sources of lock-in through path dependency: from demand, supply as well as the regulatory side. We conclude that automotive engines were significantly locked into a trajectory of internal combustion technology due to techno-economic mechanisms, which produced inertia despite social pressures. The creation of an alternative path, on the other hand, initially stalled. Various stakeholders were unsuccessful in marketing their electric or hybrid-electric vehicles in the 1990s, such as Peugeot/Citroen with various electric models, or Audi with their Duo in 1997. However, after 2000 we find that sustaining efforts of California's Air Resources Board and Toyota were triggering creation of a new innovation path of hybrid-electric engines.

The assumed selfishness of market actors could be considered in the context of two perspectives: macroeconomic and microeconomic. The first concerns the market mechanism as the most effective from the social well-being or the wealth of a nation points of view. The latter is based on the premises of the nature of human beings. I have distinguished between two possible ways of understanding selfish forms of behaviour in the market: as rational economic behaviour i.e. the most effective from the gains and losses point of view (i.e. public interests in the works of A. Smith) or as selfish from the psychological point of view (this is mostly presented by J. S. Mill's theory). The first approach seems to be concerned with the creation of the most effective market mechanism from the State's point of view. In the context of historical processes over 400 years, cultural evolution “has been promoting” selfish behaviour; for example, it was widely presented in T. Hobbes' works and then for over 200 years, the theory of A. Smith has been supporting and moulding the institutional context of market and social behaviour. Thus, positive economics describes the market created by the ideas of a neo-classical paradigm, which is based on the normative premises of A. Smith and J. S. Mill. Moreover, the virtual market behaviour described by “effects” (f. e. Veblen's effect) and failures seems to be a manifestation of a discrepancy between market reality and the classical assumptions.The social evolution of human beings has been advantageous to the human species. Moreover, from the social point of view, pro-social behaviour is “natural” as well as desirable and it has been preferred by the cultural evolution. Competitiveness assumes that somebody has to lose, because someone gains. Cooperation looks for gains for all the players. The choice is political, and not imposed by selfishness.

Avian parents and social insect colonies are victimized by interspecific brood parasites-cheats that procure costly care for their dependent offspring by leaving them in another species' nursery. Birds and insects defend themselves from attack by brood parasites; their defences in turn select counter-strategies in the parasite, thus setting in motion antagonistic co-evolution between the two parties. Despite their considerable taxonomic disparity, here we show striking parallels in the way that co-evolution between brood parasites and their hosts proceeds in insects and birds. First, we identify five types of co-evolutionary arms race from the empirical literature, which are common to both systems. These are: (a) directional co-evolution of weaponry and armoury; (b) furtiveness in the parasite countered by strategies in the host to expose the parasite; (c) specialist parasites mimicking hosts who escape by diversifying their genetic signatures; (d) generalist parasites mimicking...

Abstract—Individuals make commitments towards others in order to influence others to behave in certain ways. Most commitments may depend on some incentive that is required to ensure that the action is in the agent’s best interest and thus, should be carried out to avoid eventual penalties. Similarly, individuals may ground their decision on an accurate assessment of the intentions of others. Hence, both commitments and intention recognition go side by side in behavioral evolution. Here, we analyze the role played by the co-evolution of intention recognition plus the emergence of commitments, in the framework of the evolution of cooperative behavior. We resort to tools of evolutionary game theory in finite populations, showing how the combination of these two aspects of human behavior can enhance the emergent fraction of cooperative acts under a broad spectrum of configurations. I.

This paper examines the interplay of opinion exchange dynamics and communication network formation. An opinion formation procedure is introduced which is based on an abstract representation of opinions as $k$--dimensional bit--strings. Individuals interact if the difference in the opinion strings is below a defined similarity threshold $d_I$. Depending on $d_I$, different behaviour of the population is observed: low values result

Offshoring of technical and administrative work has become an established business practice in recent years. One key aspect of offshoring decisions is the choice of location. Prior research suggests that availability of expertise and low cost labor are major location choice factors, whereas geographical distance does not matter much because of advancement of IT. By contrast, we show that access to talent pools, external expertise and geographical proximity are important trade-offs and part of a competitive dynamic that unfolds over time. Based on comprehensive data of early and more recent offshore investments of U.S. and Dutch companies, we conduct a multi-level analysis of the likelihood of nearshore vs. farshore implementations over time. Findings suggest a co-evolutionary dynamic of location choices, changing industry and labor market conditions. Results point to limitations of conventional theories of internationalization and may inspire follow-up studies accounting for these m...

Information about the population genetic structures of parasites is important for an understanding of parasite transmission pathways and ultimately the co-evolution with their hosts. If parasites cannot disperse independently of their hosts, a parasite’s population structure will depend upon the host’s spatial distribution. Geographical barriers affecting host dispersal can therefore lead to structured parasite populations. However, how the host’s social system affects the genetic structure of parasite populations is largely unknown. We used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to describe the spatio-temporal population structure of a contact-transmitted parasitic wing mite (Spinturnix bechsteini) and compared it to that of its social host, the Bechstein’s bat (Myotis bechsteinii). We observed no genetic differentiation between mites living on different bats within a colony. This suggests that mites can move freely among bats of the same colony. As expected in case of restricted inter-colony dispersal, we observed a strong genetic differentiation of mites among demographically isolated bat colonies. In contrast, we found a strong genetic turnover between years when we investigated the temporal variation of mite haplotypes within colonies. This can be explained with mite dispersal occuring between colonies and bottlenecks of mite populations within colonies. The observed absence of isolation by distance could be the result from genetic drift and/or from mites dispersing even between remote bat colonies, whose members may meet at mating sites in autumn or in hibernacula in winter. Our data show that the population structure of this parasitic wing mite is influenced by its own demography and the peculiar social system of its bat host.