Next meeting: 4:40pm, Wednesday 4th July

The next NAME meeting will be held in two weeks time - 4:30pm on Wednesday, 4th July, room TBC.

The topic of the next meeting with be Chris Adami's discussion on biological complexity. I have attached Adami's 2002 review paper to this email. Please read and come armed with questions and comments!

Joel Peck will be leading the discussions. He would like us to consider the following three questions:

1 - Is the measure in this paper really a reasonable measure of biological complexity?

2 - What practical difficulties might be encountered if one tried to applied the measure described?

3 - If you have problems with the proposed measure, what alternative measure might be used to measure biological complexity?

The room may change from ARUN401 as we would prefer something more conducive to group discussion.

Meeting Report: 20th June 2007

The first NAME meeting was held today. We plan to post meeting reports for all meetings. These will vary as some meetings will essentially be presentation / question sessions, some round table discussions and perhaps other formats.

The meeting today consisted of:

• Nathaniel and James restating their motivations for creating the group

• Introductions and research interests of those attending

• List of those not attending, but who we feel may be interested in attending

• Discussion of possible meeting format

• List of future meeting topics

With regards the next meeting, Joel Peck from the Centre for the Study of Evolution will be leading a discusion on information theory and it applications to population genetics - in particular the work of Chris Adami. James and Nathaniel will be emailing out the paper before the meeting.

The next meeting is provisionally scheduled for Wednesday 4th July - in TWO weeks time, not the originally stated ONE week. James and Nathaniel plan to have weekly NAME meetings in the very near future.

Inman Harvey drew people's attention to the workshop on mathematical models in evolution that will be held in Sussex on 20-21 September. The website for this event is in the "links" section of this blog.

James compiled a long list of attendees research interests. He will post this to this blog shortly.

James and Nathaniel will be contacting a number of people who were not aware of todays meeting, but may be interested in attending.

First Meeting: 20th June, 16:30, ARUN401

This first meeting will allow us to introduce ourselves, state our research interests and what we hope to get out of the group.

Please bring along any lists of publications that you would like to discuss in future. We are very interested in having members of the group lead discussions on a particular topic, or present their own work.

NAME is a new reading and discussion group at Sussex University that will be conducted via regular weekly meetings, a mailing list and a blog.

It is designed to foster collaboration between the mathematical, physical and life sciences and artificial life, primarily with application to evolutionary theory and ecology.

NAME can stand for "New Approaches to Modelling Ecosystems" or "New Approaches to Modelling Evolution".

We envisage discussions that will span the fields of ecology, evolutionary theory, artificial life, biology, mathematics, physics and computational modelling. We believe these domains are ripe for cross-fertilization. We are particularly interested in models that include feedback between populations and their environment. Proposed topics include:

* niche construction
* ecosystem thermodynamics
* levels of selection
* homeostatic models
* network approaches
* information theory in evolution

We will meet on a regular (weekly) basis with a program of invited speakers presenting research or leading discussions. We hope to pursue both abstract models and real world issues.

Please contact us if you have an interest in joining our group; we will add you to the mailing list.

James Dyke & Nathaniel Virgo
j.g.dyke@sussex.ac.uk
nathanielvirgo@gmail.com