The equivalence of neo-Darwinism and Walrasian equilibrium: in defense of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Organismus economicus</Emphasis>

Neo-Darwinism is based on the same principles as the Walrasian analysis of equilibrium. This may be surprising for evolutionary economists who resort to neo-Darwinism as a result of their dissatisfaction with Walrasian economics. As it is well-known, the principle of rationality does not play a role in neo-Darwinism. In fact, the whole (neo-)Darwinian agenda became popular exactly because it expunged the idea of rationality from nature, and hence, from equilibrium. It is less known, however, that the rationality principle is also not central in Walrasian equilibrium analysis. Therefore, if we find that the rationality principle must be central to the analysis of decision making of human and nonhuman organisms, we must advance organomics. Organomics is bioeconomics understood as the use of rational choice to the study of the behavior of human and nonhuman organisms. Organomics offers a different starting point than the one offered by neo-Darwinism.     

Resource Management for Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks with Cluster Organization

Boosted by technology advancements, government and commercial interest, ad-hoc wireless networks are emerging as a serious platform for distributed mission-critical applications. Guaranteeing QoS in this environment is a hard problem because several applications may share the same resources in the network, and mobile ad-hoc wireless networks (MANETs) typically exhibit high variability in network topology and communication quality. In this paper we introduce DYNAMIQUE, a resource management infrastructure for MANETs. We present a resource model for multi-application admission control that optimizes the application admission utility, defined as a combination of the QoS satisfaction ratio. A method based on external adaptation (shrinking QoS for existing applications and later QoS expansion) is introduced as a way to reduce computation complexity by reducing the search space. We designed an application admission protocol that uses a greedy heuristic to improve application utility. For this, the admission control considers network topology information from the routing layer. Specifically, the admission protocol takes benefit from a cluster network organization, as defined by ad-hoc routing protocols such as CBRP and LANMAR. Information on cluster membership and cluster head elections allows the admission protocol to minimize control signaling and to improve application quality by localizing task mapping.     

A model for resource management in computational grid using sequential auction and bargaining procurement

Resources in a computational grid system fall under the purview of different administrative domains of varying policies for their usages. Commercial grid offers their services (resources) on use-and-pay basis. Resource management in computational grid, offers a market place for the two prominent grid market players i.e. resource provider and resource consumer. It has been observed that, in the grid, the request for the resources may not be uniform throughout. It fluctuates from very high demand at peak time to low or negligible at off-peak time. This information may be used to fetch the resource utilization and cost benefits out of the grid. The provider would prefer to charge extra for its resources at peak time, whereas users may shift their resources usage preference to off-peak time. This work proposes a model in which the resource provider and consumer play a non-cooperative game at different time-zones and act independently to choose their actions. Some characteristic parameters such as cost, execution time and reliability have been considered to facilitate the job execution. Based on the outcome of the game, the grid cluster offering maximum reliability within the desired execution time and/or cost for the job execution. The model has been simulated for performance evaluation with quite encouraging results.     

How should parents adjust the size of their young in response to local environmental cues?

Models of parental investment typically assume that populations are well mixed and homogeneous and have devoted little attention to the impact of spatial variation in the local environment. Here, in a patch‐structured model with limited dispersal, we assess to what extent resource‐rich and resource‐poor mothers should alter the size of their young in response to the local environment in their patch. We show that limited dispersal leads to a correlation between maternal and offspring environments, which favours plastic adjustment of offspring size in response to local survival risk. Strikingly, however, resource‐poor mothers are predicted to respond more strongly to local survival risk, whereas resource‐rich mothers are predicted to respond less strongly. This lack of sensitivity on the part of resource‐rich mothers is favoured because they accrue much of their fitness through dispersing young. By contrast, resource‐poor mothers accrue a larger fraction of their fitness through philopatric young and should therefore respond more strongly to local risk. Mothers with more resources gain a larger share of their fitness through dispersing young partly because their fitness in the local patch is constrained by the limited number of local breeding spots. In addition, when resource variation occurs at the patch level, the philopatric offspring of resource‐rich mothers face stronger competition from the offspring of other local mothers, who also enjoy abundant resources. The effect of limited local breeding opportunities becomes less pronounced as patch size increases, but the impact of patch‐level variation in resources holds up even with many breeders per patch.     

Does competition between resources change the competition between their consumers to mutualism? Variations on two themes by Vandermeer

How does competition between resources affect the interaction between consumer species that share those resources? Existing theory suggests that high resource competition can lead to mutualism. However, this is based on an analysis that need only apply near equilibrium, and experimental demonstrations of such mutualism are rare. Two alternative approaches to measuring food web mutualism are examined here. These are based on the population-level effects of adding or removing a consumer species or on the amount of additional mortality that can be applied to one consumer without excluding it. Both measures suggest that mutualism is likely to be confined to two situations: when overlap in resource use by the consumers is very low and when the consumers are inefficient users of their resources. Competition between resources is also likely to increase the occurrence and magnitude of "hypercompetition" between consumers, where the reduction in population size caused by the introduced consumer is greater than that caused by a consumer that is identical to the resident species. Competition between resources can also increase the negative interaction between consumers by destabilizing the dynamics of the system. Such destabilization can cause negative indirect interactions between specialist consumers having no overlap in resource use.     

A strategy for scheduling reduce task based on intermediate data locality of the MapReduce

In this paper, researching on task scheduling is a way from the perspective of resource allocation and management to improve performance of Hadoop system. In order to save the network bandwidth resources in Hadoop cluster environment and improve the performance of Hadoop system, a ReduceTask scheduling strategy that based on data-locality is improved. In MapReduce stage, there are two main data streams in cluster network, they are slow task migration and remote copies of data. The two overlapping burst data transfer can easily become bottlenecks of the cluster network. To reduce the amount of remote copies of data, combining with data-locality, we establish a minimum network resource consumption model (MNRC). MNRC is used to calculate the network resources consumption of ReduceTask. Based on this model, we design a delay priority scheduling policy for the ReduceTask which is based on the cost of network resource consumption. Finally, MNRC is verified by simulation experiments. Evaluation results show that MNRC outperforms the saving cluster network resource by an average of 7.5% in heterogeneous.     

Sustainable Utilization and Economic Development of Some Plant Resources in Northern Pakistan

Overshadowed by the vast impact that habitat loss has on targeted plant species survival, it is easy to overlook the fact that utilization and harvesting of species can often result in their genetic depletion and in an often rapid downward trend of their population status. In this regard an ethnobotanical study on the medicinal plants of Shawar valley, District Swat was conducted with the aims to document medicinal plants and to examine the current status of the medicinal plants trade as well as the market chain starting from collectors to consumers. The survey reported 50 species of plants belonging to 33 families as ethnomedicinally important. These species were used as crud drugs by the local people and folk-lore for treating diseases in traditional system of medicine. The detailed local uses, recipe preparation along with their local names and diseases treated were recorded for each species.Market survey revealed that the structure of medicinal plant trade is complex and heterogeneous, involving many players. The collectors are often not aware of the high market prices and medicinal values, and most of the collected material is sold to local middlemen at a very low price. There was an increase of 3 to 5 folds in prices from collectors to the national market.Recommendations were given in the spheres of training sustainable harvesting and post harvesting of wild medicinal plant resources, trade monitoring, equitable sharing of benefits of wild resources, improved control on harvesting and trade for the conservation of resources, enhancement of cultivation efforts, future research into trade in wild harvested plants, community participation in natural resource management and value addition in the herbal products to maximize the benefits.     

Research on heterogeneous data integration model of group enterprise based on cluster computing

Cluster, consisting of a group of computers, is to act as a whole system to provide users with computer resources. Each computer is a node of this cluster. Cluster computer refers to a system consisting of a complete set of computers connected to each other. With the rapid development of computer technology, cluster computing technique with high performance–cost ratio has been widely applied in distributed parallel computing. For the large-scale close data in group enterprise, a heterogeneous data integration model was built under cluster environment based on cluster computing, XML technology and ontology theory. Such model could provide users unified and transparent access interfaces. Based on cluster computing, the work has solved the heterogeneous data integration problems by means of Ontology and XML technology. Furthermore, good application effect has been achieved compared with traditional data integration model. Furthermore, it was proved that this model improved the computing capacity of system, with high performance–cost ratio. Thus, it is hoped to provide support for decision-making of enterprise managers.     

Food Resource Characteristics in Two Nocturnal Lemurs with Different Social Behavior: Avahi occidentalis and Lepilemur edwardsi

I present results from a comparative field study on the feeding behavior of the gregarious Avahi occidentalis and the solitary-but-social Lepilemur edwardsi to evaluate hypotheses relating to social organization and food resources. While Avahi and Lepilemur are both nocturnal, have comparable body weights and positional behaviors, and are both folivorous, they differ in their social organization. Therefore, they present an ideal model for assessing food resource characteristics through comparisons of food selection in both species with regard to forest composition. The monogamous Avahi tend to select under-represented resources. They are repeatedly exploited, which suggests that their location must be known. It is worthwhile and probably imperative to defend those resources. Such defense imposes ranging limitations on male Avahi. Females may prefer familiar mates that will share their knowledge of resource location and defend the resources. A stable monogamous pattern could be the optimal strategy. In contrast, food selection by Lepilemur is based on common resources to a higher degree, but they show a lower degree of exploitation. Lepilemur males would be less restricted and could potentially opt for a different strategy, e.g., a dispersed harem. It is unclear whether this strategy is realized or not. I discuss other possible correlates of monogamy—infanticide protection, predation avoidance—but the gregarious pattern in Avahi may best be seen as a retention, and its nocturnal activity as a secondary adaptation.     

Competitive overlap and coexistence

The possibility of equilibrium is studied for model assemblages of competing species and their resources. The “assemblage niche” is defined as the set of resource productivities which yields an equilibrium population exceeding zero for all species. A radius of this set, which is a measure of the ability of the assemblage to have equilibrium states, is defined and estimated. This radius decreases as resource utilization overlap increases; the behavior is compared with known results concerning response to rapid resource fluctuations. A system of ordinary differential equations having such an equilibrium is studied. It is shown that a global asymptotic stability property holds in regions with boundaries defined by a certain scalar function, if the specific productivity satisfies a monotonicity condition. This generalizes known results, which have been obtained for antisymmetric Lotka-Volterra systems.     

Modelling the depletion and conservation of forestry resources: effects of population and pollution

 In this paper, a mathematical model is proposed to study the depletion of resources in a forest habitat due to the increase of both population and pollution. It is shown that if the rate of pollutant emission into the environment is either population dependent, constant, or periodic, the equilibrium biomass density of the resource settles down to a lower equilibrium than its original carrying capacity, the magnitude of which decreases as the equilibrium levels of the density of population and the concentration of pollutant increase. However, in the case of an instantaneous spill of pollutant into the environment, the equilibrium biomass density decreases with the increase of the equilibrium density of population only. It is found that if the population density and the emission rate of pollutant increase without control, the forestry resource may become extinct. A conservation model is also proposed, the analysis of which shows that the resource biomass can be maintained at a desired level by conserving the forestry resource and by controlling the growth of population and the emission rate of pollutant in the habitat. Received 1 June 1993; received in revised form 1 January 1997     

A marginal model of tolerated theft

Using marginal analysis to represent Blurton Jones's concept of tolerated theft, I show how equilibrium resource transfers among individuals might be affected by foraging behavior, resource qualities, and number of participants. The model applies to hominids and other species that exchange or share food or other resources. Among the results: Tolerated theft enhances the value to be derived from resources, packets intermediate in size are most likely to be subjected to tolerated theft, packet division is more likely to be unequal than equal, division is a function of group size, and tolerated theft is most likely in small groups. The model also suggests that among reciprocators the widest possible exchange or sharing is in the self-interest of the individual procuring the resource. In general, evolutionary cost-benefit accounting should track marginal changes in the value (fitness or utility) of resources. Marginal valuation is conceptually primary and may produce results that differ from direct measures of quantity.     

Decentralized resource allocation to control an epidemic: A game theoretic approach

This paper examines how two countries would allocate resources at the onset of an epidemic when they seek to protect their own populations by minimizing the total number of infectives over the entire time horizon. We model this situation as a game between selfish countries, where players strategically allocate their resources in order to minimize the total number of infected individuals in their respective populations during the epidemic. We study this problem when the initial number of infectives is very small, which greatly simplifies the analysis. We show in this framework that selfish countries always allocate their resources so as to bring the effective reproduction ratio below one and avoid a major outbreak. When a major outbreak is avoidable, we further identify the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the individual allocation decisions of selfish countries match the decision that a central planner would make in order to minimize the total number of infectives in the whole population (without distinguishing between countries).     

Integration in the clonal plant <Emphasis Type="Italic">Eriophorum angustifolium</Emphasis>: an experiment with a three-member-clonal system in a patchy environment

A clonal plant in heterogeneous environments is usually expected to profit from resource exchange via a clonal network where ramets placed in contrasting environments can specialise so to acquire the most abundant resources. An experiment was designed using the three member clonal system of Eriophorum angustifolium, which consisted of one parent ramet growing in a resource poor environment and two offspring: one was limited in growth by nutrients while the other was light limited; the contrast in availability of limited resources between the offspring ramets was high, medium or none, with the system either connected or severed. The total resource availability was the same in all treatments. We proposed four possible scenarios for the system: offspring ramets will share resources via the deficient parent ramet, and the whole clone will profit from the contrasting environment (scenario 1); offspring ramets will support exclusively the parent ramet, and the whole clone will profit from a homogeneous environment (scenario 2); offspring ramets will stop the export of the limiting resource to the parent ramet, with split and connected treatments not differing (scenario 3); and offspring ramets will exhaust the carbon stored in the biomass of the parental ramet; offspring ramet will profit from connection (scenario 4). In the experiment, the limiting resources were sent to the strongest sink (scenario 2). The parent ramet growing in a deficient environment received the highest support in the treatment where both offspring ramets were growing in the same conditions (no-contrast treatment). Production of new shoots, but not biomass of whole clone, was supported in a homogenous environment. The experiment revealed that multiple stresses might prohibit free exchange of limiting resources via the clonal network and supports the idea that experimental studies on more complex clones are essential for understanding the costs and benefits of clonal growth.     

Periodic coexistence of four species competing for three essential resources

We show the existence of a periodic solution in which four species coexist in competition for three essential resources in the standard model of resource competition. By assuming that species i is limited by resource i for each i near the positive equilibrium, and that the matrix of contents of resources in species is a combination of cyclic matrix and a symmetric matrix, we obtain an asymptotically stable periodic solution of three species on three resources via Hopf bifurcation. A simple bifurcation argument is then employed which allows us to add a fourth species. In principle, the argument can be continued to obtain a periodic solution adding one new species at a time so long as asymptotic stability can be assured at each step. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate our analytical results. The results of this paper suggest that competition can generate coexistence of species in the form of periodic cycles, and that the number of coexisting species can exceed the number of resources in a constant and homogeneous environment.     

Dangerous nutrients: Evolution of phytoplankton resource uptake subject to virus attack

Phytoplankton need multiple resources to grow and reproduce (such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron), but the receptors through which they acquire resources are, in many cases, the same channels through which viruses attack. Therefore, phytoplankton can face a bottom-up vs. top-down tradeoff in receptor allocation: Optimize resource uptake or minimize virus attack? We investigate this top-down vs. bottom-up tradeoff using an evolutionary ecology model of multiple essential resources, specialist viruses that attack through the resource receptors, and a phytoplankton population that can evolve to alter the fraction of receptors used for each resource/virus type. Without viruses present the singular continuously stable strategy is to allocate receptors such that resources are co-limiting, which also minimizes the equilibrium concentrations of both resources. Only one virus type can be present at equilibrium (because phytoplankton, in this model, are a single resource for viruses), and when a virus type is present, it controls the equilibrium phytoplankton population size. Despite this top-down control on equilibrium densities, bottom-up control determines the evolutionary outcome. Regardless of which virus type is present, the allocation strategy that yields co-limitation between the two resources is continuously stable. This is true even when the virus type attacking through the limiting resource channel is present, even though selection for co-limitation in this case decreases the equilibrium phytoplankton population and does not decrease the equilibrium concentration of the limiting resource. Therefore, although moving toward co-limitation and decreasing the equilibrium concentration of the limiting resource often co-occur in models, it is co-limitation, and not necessarily the lowest equilibrium concentration of the limiting resource, that is the result of selection. This result adds to the growing body of literature suggesting that co-limitation at equilibrium is a winning strategy.     

A resource-sharing model based on a repeated game in fog computing

With the rapid development of cloud computing techniques, the number of users is undergoing exponential growth. It is difficult for traditional data centers to perform many tasks in real time because of the limited bandwidth of resources. The concept of fog computing is proposed to support traditional cloud computing and to provide cloud services. In fog computing, the resource pool is composed of sporadic distributed resources that are more flexible and movable than a traditional data center. In this paper, we propose a fog computing structure and present a crowd-funding algorithm to integrate spare resources in the network. Furthermore, to encourage more resource owners to share their resources with the resource pool and to supervise the resource supporters as they actively perform their tasks, we propose an incentive mechanism in our algorithm. Simulation results show that our proposed incentive mechanism can effectively reduce the SLA violation rate and accelerate the completion of tasks.     

Survival enhancement through food sharing: a means for parental control of natal dispersal.

The value of food sharing among relatives is analyzed for a situation where fitness equals survival. In seasonal environments the minimum food abundance may set a limit to group living. Delayed dispersal is predicted to be linked to relaxed winter competition and high parental survival. Enhanced survival for the offspring when parents share food could be a sufficient reason to delay dispersal, while early dispersal in advance of food shortage periods may be induced by a competitive relationship. At low resource abundance dominant parents do best by being competitive and retaining all resources. For food abundance higher than the expected requirements food sharing with independent offspring is possible, although it has a non-zero cost. Food sharing parents still retain most of resources to themselves, but the resource share given to subordinate offspring gradually gets larger when food abundance increases. Except for at very low food abundance, where subordinates may adopt a "suicidal" behaviour and cede their resources to the dominant, there is a conflict over how to share the resources.     

A general model of the public goods dilemma

An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favours individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio, parasite virulence, microbial metabolism, punishment of noncooperators, and nearly all aspects of sociality have been analysed as public goods shaped by kin and group selection. Here, I develop two general aspects of the public goods problem that have received relatively little attention. First, variation in individual resources favours selfish individuals to vary their allocation to public goods. Those individuals better endowed contribute their excess resources to public benefit, whereas those individuals with fewer resources contribute less to the public good. Thus, purely selfish behaviour causes individuals to stratify into upper classes that contribute greatly to public benefit and social cohesion and to lower classes that contribute little to the public good. Second, if group success absolutely requires production of the public good, then the pressure favouring production is relatively high. By contrast, if group success depends weakly on the public good, then the pressure favouring production is relatively weak. Stated in this way, it is obvious that the role of baseline success is important. However, discussions of public goods problems sometimes fail to emphasize this point sufficiently. The models here suggest simple tests for the roles of resource variation and baseline success. Given the widespread importance of public goods, better models and tests would greatly deepen our understanding of many processes in biology and sociality.     

Land Use/Cover Change in the Middle Reaches of the Heihe River Basin over 2000-2011 and Its Implications for Sustainable Water Resource Management

The Heihe River Basin (HRB) is a typical arid inland river basin in northwestern China. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the downstream flow in the HRB declined as a result of large, artificial changes in the distribution of water and land and a lack of effective water resource management. Consequently, the ecosystems of the lower reaches of the basin substantially deteriorated. To restore these degraded ecosystems, the Ecological Water Diversion Project (EWDP) was initiated by the Chinese government in 2000. The project led to agricultural and ecological changes in the middle reaches of the basin. In this study, we present three datasets of land use/cover in the middle reaches of the HRB derived from Landsat TM/ETM+ images in 2000, 2007 and 2011. We used these data to investigate changes in land use/cover between 2000 and 2011 and the implications for sustainable water resource management. The results show that the most significant land use/cover change in the middle reaches of the HRB was the continuous expansion of farmland for economic interests. From 2000 to 2011, the farmland area increased by 12.01%. The farmland expansion increased the water resource stress; thus, groundwater was over-extracted and the ecosystem was degraded in particular areas. Both consequences are negative and potentially threaten the sustainability of the middle reaches of the HRB and the entire river basin. Local governments should therefore improve the management of water resources, particularly groundwater management, and should strictly control farmland reclamation. Then, water resources could be ecologically and socioeconomically sustained, and the balance between upstream and downstream water demands could be ensured. The results of this study can also serve as a reference for the sustainable management of water resources in other arid inland river basins.