Originally Posted by James Brody

The emergent networks folks can sit in a dry lab with cold coffee and hot computers. The synchrony found in that GxE product tells us about organizations in cells, crickets, neurons, cardiac pacemakers, and power grids. It also tells us that what we see today in our simulations and in our neighbors also existed in the communities of 500 million years ago, found by Wolcott in the Burgess Shale.

The effect is like traveling 100 light years and being met by your twin!

JimB

Ancient Ecosystems Organized Much Like Our Own

ScienceDaily (May 1, 2008) — Similarities between half-billion-year-old and recent food webs point to deep principles underpinning the structure of ecological relationships, as shown by researchers from the Santa Fe Institute, Microsoft Research Cambridge and elsewhere. Analyses of Chengjiang and Burgess Shale food-web data suggest that most, but not all, aspects of the trophic structure of modern ecosystems were in place over a half-billion years ago. It was an Anomalocaris-eat-trilobite world, filled with species like nothing on today's Earth. But the ecology of Cambrian communities was remarkably modern, say researchers behind the first study to reconstruct detailed food webs for ancient ecosystems. Their paper suggests that networks of feeding relationships among marine species that lived hundreds of millions of years ago are remarkably similar to those of today."

Journal reference: Dunne JA, Williams RJ, Martinez ND, Wood RA, Erwin DH (2008) Compilation and network analyses of Cambrian food webs. PLoS Biol 6(4): e102. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060102

More at: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0428200309.htm


References

Barabási, A-L (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus.
Barabási, A-L (2005) Taming complexity. Nature Physics. 1: 68-70.
Brody J (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. http://www.rebellionphysicstopersonalwill.blogspot.com/
Gould, S. (1989) Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. NY: Norton.
Strogatz, S. (2003) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. NY: Hyperion.