Semi-recent updates:
Slides from the Ecological Society of America meeting, August 2008:
How Selection
Acts on Interactions, and Why It Favors Mutual Benefit.
This talk was part of a special ESA symposium titled
New
Approaches to the Evolution of Social Behavior,
convened by
Erol Akçay and Joan Roughgarden.
Poster presentation from Networks in Political Science meeting,
June 2008:
Evolutionary
Graph Theory and Structural Power.
Slides from the American
Society for Cybernetics meeting, May 14, 2008:
New
Theoretical Support for the Gaia Hypothesis:
Multilevel selection meets Ashby's ultrastability
or something like that. After giving this talk I was given
the ASC's
Heinz
von Foerster Prize
for best presentation by a young person.
Research Interests:
Self-organization, coordination and transformation in diverse systems. Ecological
evolution, community structure and dynamics. How power differences and hierarchy
emerge from interactions and exchanges. Cultural change, consensus formation,
democracy, cooperation. Critical analysis of scientific discourses. Ways of facilitating
global justice, equality, solidarity and sustainability.
I finished a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 2003, focusing on evolution and ecology.
From fall 2003 through summer 2005 I worked with Alan Hastings and Louis
Botsford at UC Davis, on the population biology of age-structured Pacific
salmon
species.
From fall 2005 through summer 2007, I was a Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral
fellow at UC Berkeley, working on problems related to self-organization
and
sustainability.
I'm currently working with Jonathan Dushoff of McMaster University,
on extending the MediaWiki software package to work interchangeably
with composing scholarly papers in LaTeX for submission to journals,
and for archiving original research reports, computer programs, and
related data, for download and verification.
The Rise and Fall of the
Whole Earth Catalog
A paper I delivered recently at a conference here in Berkeley.
Storytelling and Responsibility In Science and Other
Ecosystems
The introduction chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation, a standalone essay about
models, metaphors and social responsibility.
(And here, reformatted for folding and
stapling as a pamphlet.)
Some Thoughts on Modeling and Power
The slides from a talk I gave in 2003 about science and
creating a better world.
Notes from the Greenhouse World
A working paper on my current project, which deals with cooperation
in an ecological/evolutionary setting with a complex network of relationships.
(and:
Cooperation, sustainability, power dynamics, and survival in
evolutionary ecology: Working paper and research proposal:
an earlier paper on that project).
Evolutionary escape from the prisoner's dilemma
Journal of Theoretical Biology 245 (2007): 411-422
A recent paper on cooperation.
(persistent link)
Evolution, Constraint, Cooperation, and
Community Structure in Simple Models.
My Ph.D. dissertation, in pdf form. Caution: it's a 14 Mb file.
phone: (415) 550-1420
email: worden@berkeley.edu
address: 2937 Twenty-Sixth St. #4, San Francisco, CA 94110