10th December 2009 4 p.m. Nightingale Building (B67), Room 1007, Highfield Campus
Seminars at SENSe: Artificial Life, Real Worlds: Can ALife help explain the past and the future of life on Earth?
Dr James Dyke, Research Scientist Biospheric Theory & Modelling Group
Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Germany
- Web page
- http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/bgc-theory/
- Categories
- Evolution
- Submitter
- Deborah Guy
Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
The search for life elsewhere in the universe has occupied people for as long as they have imagined other worlds. Our current understanding is that while there may be a great number of planets that could harbour life, the Earth is the only confirmed site of widespread life. We are therefore inhabitants of the most complex system in the known universe. How can we understand and predict this system? Will we ever be in a position to control it?
Rather than being of limited academic interest, the global community desperately need theories that can account for how a living, adaptive Earth evolves and responds in the face of perturbations such as human produced climate change. I will argue that Alife has a potentially significant contribution to make in this respect because Alife is already developing and deploying the sorts of tools and techniques that will be required to understand a truly adaptive Earth.
Evolutionary studies typically characterise the multi-faceted environment as a proxy for supplying a selection pressure to which populations of organisms respond: the 'lock and key' perspective of evolution where organisms adapt in order to fit their environments. This misses the essentially co-evolutionary dynamics that arise from the effects that organisms can have on their environments.
Earth System models (which include the sorts of models that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on) include the effects that life has on its abiotic surroundings, but typically in a parameterised form: the models are 'dead' in that there are no adaptive dynamics. In these models, life does not respond and evolve to changing environmental conditions. Consequently very large assumptions are made with respect to the magnitude and even the sign of forcing that life will exert on the Earth system as it changes.
I will review a number of previous and ongoing studies that I think embody the co-evolutionary dynamics that will be responsible for bringing Earth System models to life and so build a more complete picture of the living Earth. This will include an overview of the work that I am currently engaged in with particular focus on how possible collaborations with Alife practitioners may strengthen it.
All welcome!