Center for Resilience, Adaptation and Mitigation (CReAM), Universidad Mayor, Temuco, 4801043, Chile.
PLR Physics Ludique Research, Santiago, 9761013, Chile.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2024 Jan;379(1893):20220260. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2022.0260. Epub 2023 Nov 13.
Modern humanity has changed the biosphere at a global scale, threatening its own sustainability. It is claimed that through technology humans maximize the extraction of energy from the natural system towards their own benefit, with rates of appropriation that surpass the time-scales for systemic adaptation. This time-decoupled coevolutionary dynamic is at the core of human societal unsustainability. Here, we developed experiments of an open energy-based flowing network toy model of natural systems and study the effects that evolutionary strategies, resembling human societal demands, have upon the performance and of the system. We aim to determine the flexibility that those biased evolutionary dynamics have for matching or surpassing natural evolution outcomes. We studied four different indexes of system's growth and development (total system throughflow (TST), average mutual information, ascendency and entropy difference) and compare their scarcity tolerance and performance outcomes with respect to four different greedy scenarios. The results showed that greedy strategies rarely surpassed the tolerance and performance achieved by natural systemic evolution. The nature of the greedy scenarios developed were closely related to increases in TST and therefore, we emphasized this comparison. Here, the maximum percentage of greedy networks capable of surpassing natural dynamics was around one-third (approx. [Formula: see text]). However, results suggest the existence of a space parameter where local increases of energy flow can outperform the outcomes of natural systemic evolution, but no evident network property seems to characterize those greedy networks. A mild inverse relationship was found between the number of links that greedy nodes have towards the output and their capacity to outpass the control evolution. As many of the human societal effect upon biospheric processes have dissipative byproducts, knowing that such dynamics might diminish the systems tolerance and performance suggest care in their (ab)use. This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis'.
现代人类已经在全球范围内改变了生物圈，威胁到其自身的可持续性。据称，人类通过技术将从自然系统中提取能量的效率最大化，以造福自身，其利用速度超过了系统适应的时间尺度。这种时间上脱耦的共同进化动态是人类社会不可持续性的核心。在这里，我们开发了一个基于开放能源的自然系统流动网络玩具模型实验，并研究了类似于人类社会需求的进化策略对系统性能的影响。我们旨在确定这些有偏差的进化动态在匹配或超越自然进化结果方面的灵活性。我们研究了系统增长和发展的四个不同指标（总系统流量（TST）、平均互信息、优势和熵差），并比较了它们在四种不同贪婪情景下的稀缺性容忍度和性能结果。结果表明，贪婪策略很少能超过自然系统进化所达到的容忍度和性能。所开发的贪婪情景的性质与 TST 的增加密切相关，因此我们强调了这一比较。在这里，能够超过自然动态的贪婪网络的最大百分比约为三分之一（约[公式：见文本]）。然而，结果表明存在一个空间参数，其中局部能量流的增加可以超过自然系统进化的结果，但没有明显的网络特性似乎可以描述这些贪婪网络。我们发现，贪婪节点与输出之间的链接数量与它们超越控制进化的能力之间存在轻度的反比关系。由于人类社会对生物圈过程的许多影响都有耗散的副产品，因此，了解这些动态可能会降低系统的容忍度和性能，这表明在使用时需要谨慎。本文是“进化与可持续性：汇聚人类世综合的线索”主题特刊的一部分。
