Lee Worden

The San Francisco RSI support group now meets at the
hospital at Castro and Duboce on the first Monday of the
month. Follow this link for more info.

Just out:
Slides from my talk at the American Society for Cybernetics, May 14, 2008, 1:00 pm:
New Theoretical Support for the Gaia Hypothesis:
Multilevel selection meets Ashby's ultrastability

or something like that (posted 5/14 at 12:15 pm!)


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.

Since fall 2005, I've been a Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley,
working on problems related to self-organization and sustainability.


Documents for downloading:

Curriculum Vitae

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.


Below this line, more technical papers:

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.


Send me comments or questions:

phone: (415) 550-1420
email: worden@berkeley.edu
address: 2937 Twenty-Sixth St. #4, San Francisco, CA 94110