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How and why animals produce group behaviors Fish travel in schools, birds migrate in flocks, honeybees swarm, and ants build trails. How and why do these collective behaviors occur? Exploring how coordinated group patterns emerge from individual interactions, Collective Animal Behavior reveals why animals produce group behaviors and examines their evolution across a range of species. Providing a synthesis of mathematical modeling, theoretical biology, and experimental work, David Sumpter investigates how animals move and arrive together, how they transfer information, how they make decisions and synchronize their activities, and how they build collective structures. Sumpter constructs a unif...
Soccer as you have never viewed it before--an eye-opening presentation of the world s favorite sport."
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'An entertaining tour that will change how you see the world' Sean Carroll, author of Something Deeply Hidden Is there a secret formula for improving your life? For making something a viral hit? For deciding how long to stick with your current job, Netflix series, or even relationship? This book is all about the equations that make our world go round. Ten of them, in fact. They are integral to everything from investment banking to betting companies and social media giants. And they can help you to increase your chance of success, guard against financial loss, live more healthily and see through scaremongering. They are known only by mathematicians - until now. With wit and clarity, mathematician David Sumpter shows that it isn't the technical details which make these formulas so successful. It is the way they allow mathematicians to view problems from a different angle - a way of seeing the world that anyone can learn. Empowering and illuminating, The Ten Equations that Rule the World shows how maths really can change your life.
One of the greatest discoveries of recent times is that the complex patterns we find in life are often produced when all of the individuals in a group follow the same simple rule. This process of ''self-organization'' reveals itself in the inanimate worlds of crystals and seashells, but as Len Fisher shows, it is also evident in living organisms, from fish to ants to human beings. The coordinated movements of fish in shoals, for example, arise from the simple rule: ''Follow the fish in front.'' Traffic flow arises from simple rules: ''Keep your distance'' and ''Keep to the right.'' Now, in his new book, Fisher shows how we can manage our complex social lives in an ever more chaotic world. His investigation encompasses topics ranging from ''swarm intelligence'' to the science of parties and the best ways to start a fad. Finally, Fisher sheds light on the beauty and utility of complexity theory. An entertaining journey into the science of everyday life, The Perfect Swarm will delight anyone who wants to understand the complex situations in which we so often find ourselves.
While the United States is often called the Land of the Law Suit, in reality Americans hardly sue at all. In fact, when it comes to physical injuries, over 90% of the time, we--as David M. Engel points out in his engaging and provocative book--simply lump it, making no claims against either the injurers or their insurance companies. Bringing to bear an impressive array of research and data, Engel firmly and persuasively demolishes the pervasive myth of the litigious American. But why don t most people sue whey they have been wrongfully physically injured? We have in fact a mystery, what Engel calls The Case of the Missing Plaintiff. The solution his investigation leads us to is as fascinatin...
Island Studies can be deceptively challenging and rewarding for an undergraduate student. Islands can be many things: nations, tourist destinations, quarantine stations, billionaire baubles, metaphors. The study of islands offers a way to take this 'bewildering variety' and to use it as a lens and a tool to better understand our own world of islands. An Introduction to Island Studies is an approachable look at this interdisciplinary field - from the islands as biodiversity hotspots, their settlement, human migration and occupation through to the place of islands in the popular imagination. Featuring geopolitical, social and economic frameworks, James Randall gives a bottom-up guide to this m...
A groundbreaking new perspective on collective behavior across biological systems Collective behavior is everywhere in nature, from gene transcription and cancer cells to ant colonies and human societies. It operates without central control, using local interactions among participants to allow groups to adjust to changing conditions. The Ecology of Collective Behavior brings together ideas from evolutionary biology, network science, and dynamical systems to present an ecological approach to understanding how the interactions of individuals generate collective outcomes. Deborah Gordon argues that the starting point for explaining how collective behavior works in any natural system is to consi...
The pigeon is the quintessential city bird. Domesticated thousands of years ago as a messenger and a source of food, its presence on our sidewalks is so common that people consider the bird a nuisance—if they notice it at all. Yet pigeons are also kept for pleasure, sport, and profit by people all over the world, from the “pigeon wars” waged by breeding enthusiasts in the skies over Brooklyn to the Million Dollar Pigeon Race held every year in South Africa. Drawing on more than three years of fieldwork across three continents, Colin Jerolmack traces our complex and often contradictory relationship with these versatile animals in public spaces such as Venice’s Piazza San Marco and London’s Trafalgar Square and in working-class and immigrant communities of pigeon breeders in New York and Berlin. By exploring what he calls “the social experience of animals,” Jerolmack shows how our interactions with pigeons offer surprising insights into city life, community, culture, and politics. Theoretically understated and accessible to interested readers of all stripes, The Global Pigeon is one of the best and most original ethnographies to be published in decades.
An informed and heartfelt tribute to commonly unappreciated plants, insects, and other tiny creatures that reconsiders humanity’s relationship to nature Fruit flies, silverfish, dandelions, and crabgrass are the bane of many people and the target of numerous chemical and physical eradication efforts. In this compelling reassessment of the relationship between humans and the natural world, John Hainze—an entomologist and former pesticide developer—considers the fascinating and bizarre history of how these so-called invasive or unwanted pests and weeds have coevolved with humanity and highlights the benefits of a greater respect and moral consideration toward these organisms. With deep insight into the lives of the underappreciated and often reviled creatures that surround us, Hainze’s accessible and engaging natural history draws on ethics, religion, and philosophy as he passionately argues that creepy crawlies and unwanted plants deserve both empathy and accommodation as partners dwelling with us on earth.
Communication is essential for all forms of social interaction from parental care, to mate choice to cooperation. This book is a timely and novel synthesis. It bridges many of the gaps between proximate and ultimate levels of analysis, between empirical model systems, and between biology and the humanities. The book offers the complementary approaches of a distinguished group of authors spanning a large diversity of research programs, addressing, for example, thegenetic basis of bacterial communication, dishonest communication in insect societies, sexual selection and network communication among colonial vertebrates. Other chapters explore the role ofcommunication in genomic conflict and self-organisation, and how linguistics, psychology and philosophy may ultimately contribute to a biological understanding of human mate choice and the evolution of human societies.